Valorant Patch notes 3.10 update

• Valorant Patch Notes 3.10 are here and include a new agent Chamber, removal of rank restrictions on 5-stacks and a fix to packet-sending issues
• Chamber abilities include a teleport ability, an ADS pistol and a one-shot sniper, and a slow trap.
• 5 players can now queue together regardless of rank but with increased wait times and the match result having less affect on rank

The Valorant 3.10 patch notes are here and with some interesting changes, including the long-awaited new character Chamber (a weapons designer whose abilities include an ADS Sheriff and a one-shot sniper). The patch also sees some changes to competitive with restrictions on 5-stacks being removed, meaning you can play with anyone is a group of 5 – though there are some restrictions to rank changes from this, as well as increased wait times.

New Agent Chamber

Chamber is the big-ticket item in this patch and its always exciting to get a new agent: so far we know that Chamber is French and a weapons designer, which fits in with his abilities. These include two weapons as abilities: an ADS heavy pistol (with right click activating ADS as usual, and a custom sniper that will kill an enemy with any direct hit). Chamber also comes with a teleport ability: two anchors can be dropped and if Chamber is within range of one anchor he can teleport to the other. Finally Chamber also comes with a trap ability that activates when an enemy is near and slows down their movement while they are within the zone.

Chamber also comes with the standard unlock able pistol skin, seen below. You can see more about Chamber’s abilities here.

Competitive Queue Changes

The way Valorant have explained this, they want to discourage smurfing (I’m guessing to stop lower ranked players getting blown away and having one of those games), and so they’re allowing groups of 5 to queue together regardless of rank. There are a few caveats to this though, with the first major one being that playing with a wide range of ranks will result in a lower impact of game losses/wins on your rank. This decrease on rank impact looks to be between 50-90% depending on the difference in rank – we’ve put the patch notes on this here for you to read in full. The second point to note about this is that there will likely be increased queue times for these kind of groups.

Finally, they are removing 4-stacks from the competitive queue to stop a situation where you have one player feeling left out, or where the other four are in teamspeak or discord and no information is being passed on. (This sort of makes sense, though how big an issue this was isn’t really clear to me.)

If everyone in your group is Diamond 2 and below:

- - You can expect increased queue times as we will only matchmake your team against another 5 stack of similar average MMR.
  - Rank Rating gains and losses will be reduced when playing in a 5 stack outside of our current rank restrictions rules. The amount that your RR is adjusted depends on the rank disparity within the group.
  - Let’s walk through a couple example cases:
    - You party with 4 of your friends. The lowest team member is Silver 1 and the highest is Platinum 1. Your team will be given a 50% RR reduction because the highest and lowest members are 1 rank outside the standard group restrictions.
    - In the same group, you have 1 team member leave, and bring in your other friend who is Bronze 1. Now the skill disparity has increased to 4 ranks outside of the standard grouping restrictions. Your team will be given a 75% RR reduction as a result.
- If one or more members of your group are Diamond 3 and above:
  - Your expected queue times may vary greatly, and could increase dramatically as you will wait indefinitely for another 5-stack of similar MMR to play against.
  - At minimum, a 50% RR reduction will be applied to all 5-stacks including a member from these ranks, and this amount can increase to 90% as the disparity in skill increases.
  - Let’s walk through a couple examples of these:
    - 4 of your party members are Immortal and one of your friends is Diamond 2. The whole squad has a 75% reduction to RR gains and losses due to rank disparity.
    - Your team grinds until your Diamond 2 friend reaches Diamond 3. The whole squad will now have a 50% reduction to RR gains and losses; A penalty that is applied to any 5-stack in Diamond 3 or above.
- If one or more members of your group are Radiant:
  - Similar to Diamond 3-plus, you will wait indefinitely for another 5-stack of similar MMR to play against, potentially increasing your queue times drastically.
  - At minimum, a 75% RR reduction will be applied to all 5-stacks including a member from these ranks. Playing with any player below Radiant automatically reduces your potential RR by 90%.

Packet-loss/reduction Fix

An issue where playing with over 128 frames per second caused packets to send below 128 fps has been fixed. This apparently caused a few millisecond delay in the server processing your inputs, so if you were having issues with this they’ve now been fixed. These are the more significant elements of the patch update: included below are the more minor elements.

ESPORTS FEATURES
- Observer Agent icons will no longer all get stuck on the same Agent when using the Minimal Broadcast HUD
- Observers now have different HUD colors for attackers and defenders.
  - Attacker abilities will show as red and defender abilities will show as teal
- There is now a yellow outline on player icons on the minimap to showcase which player is the active target of an observer
SOCIAL
- Fixed issues where you were able to re-invite players in lobby that were already invited
ESPORTS FEATURES
- Fixed a bug where the Observer’s minimap zoom setting did not function—thanks Melanie_mhs for the report!
- Fixed a bug where coaches could not use the hotkeys to spectate a player inside a deployed piece of utility (Cypher’s Spy Camera, Skye’s Trailblazer, or Sova’s Owl Drone)
- Fixed a bug where pressing shift plus a player number would not go to the proper cinematic camera for that player, if that player was being actively spectated