What are 128 tick servers in Valorant?

Riot Games' new competitive shooter, Valorant, shares many similarities with that of popular eSports shooters. Based on characters with abilities like Overwatch, but in 5v5 seek and destroy format like Counter Strike, the game seeks to strike a balance between the variety of the former and the seriousness of the latter.

Riot wants his players to know he's taking this seriously, too. Being free-to-play to allow maximum player coverage, and with a competitive structure similar to Counter Strike, it's clear that the Tencent-owned US developer is looking to take the competitive market from Valve and Blizzard.

One of the ways to do this is to introduce a number of key design choices that should make the game as seamless as possible, with less chance of technological limitations being a determining factor in winning the games.

The ability to play even on a low-spec PC, server data centers so vast no one has a ping over 35ms, and crisp code that the official page claims the developer has "been obsessing over for years." all promised. But another factor that may be less familiar is the promise of 128 tick servers.

In all competitive shooters, the games use servers that incorporate tick rates for their matches. It is something that you are not always aware of but is always there. Ticks are the number of times the game sends updates from your client to the server it is connected to for a second, processes and updates you on your screen.

In games where accuracy isn't always the most crucial element, like Overwatch where there are a lot of unaffected scan characters, the tick rate may be lower with less impact on the overall experience. . A lower tick rate also results in less stress on the server as it requires less data for the game to update and continue. The higher the tick rate, the more stress is put on a server, with some game engines being better optimized for more players.

Battle Royale games, for example, have a tick rate low enough to compensate for the number of players on the server, with Fortnite typically running at 20 ticks (or 20hz) for most games. This may explain situations where you might have thought you hit someone, but the game didn't register it.

Simply put, the higher a server's tick rate, the more accurate shooter games are at picking up shots and recording bullets, crucial for hit scan games. For Counter-Strike Global Offensive (CS: GO), the servers are capable of going to 128 ticks, but this is only for paid services. In the matchmaking used for ranking, for example, servers are locked at 64 ticks.

At 128 ticks for Valorant servers, that means 128 tick servers in all modes will allow precise fire no matter how you play, which is a great thing for players.