Riot Games announced Friday that it would be pushing a new “deterministic map system” to all regions in VALORANT to increase the variety of maps in the queue. Patch 4.04, which released as part of the Episode 4 Act 2 rollout that brought Yoru’s rework and major Controller changes, outlined the details of the new map system.
Today, we're pushing our new "deterministic" map system out to all regions. This should increase the variety of maps in your queue based on a system we tested at the start of Patch 4.04. You can read how it all works in our most recent patch notes, under Competitive Updates. https://t.co/VbuQOQauSI
— VALORANT (@VALORANT) March 4, 2022
The deterministic map system was initially only implemented in Latin American servers for testing purposes. According to the Patch 4.04 page, the goal of it is to “increase the variety of maps that players will encounter.” The new map system will follow three main rules when selecting a map after the 10 requisite players have been matched into a lobby. The rules are as follows:
- The system will look at all maps players have played over the last five games for that game mode
- The system will remove any map that a player has played twice in the last five games
- The system will select the least picked map overall
The caveat to these three rules is that if all maps have been removed due to them all having been played more than twice by at least one player, all maps will be added back into the pool and the least played map will be picked.
It is worth noting that the system operates within game modes. In other words, if a player has played a map twice in their last five Competitive games, then queues into Unrated, it is still possible for them to play that map again.
This new change to VALORANT is a direct response to complaints from players about playing the same map many times in one session. Currently, there are seven maps in VALORANT’s map pool, making it easy for maps to be repeated in a short span of time.
