Introduction
Sliggy on one his co-streams a while back mentioned something about wanting to see how many rounds it takes for a team to win two rounds in a row for the first time in a half if they lost pistol and I thought that would be interesting to look at because most people would say that the current VALORANT meta is very snowbally because winning pistol gets you a head start on building up your economy and ultimates which you can use into the important rounds where winning the round forces the enemy team onto an eco.
A big factor for this snowball is how VALORANT’s economy works where if you lose a round after winning a round you don’t have a loss bonus and only get 1900 credits for losing, for example it’s fairly common to see the team that loses pistol round win the 3rd round but then lose the 4th round and only get 1900 credits and have to eco on that 5th round.
We’re ultimately trying to measure how long it takes for a team to be able to stop a snowball which means how many rounds does it take for the team that loses pistol to force the enemy team onto an eco? Forcing an enemy team onto an eco round is very important because you typically don’t lose vs ecos which means it’s essentially an easy round to further build up your own economy and ultimates so forcing teams to eco is crucial for continuing your own snowball or in our case stopping the enemies and hopefully starting your own.
2 rounds in a row is acting as our baseline here because in most matches streaking together 2 rounds should be enough to force a team on an eco and while there are extreme circumstances where 2 sequential round wins isn’t enough to force an enemy team onto eco, increasing the rounds required would likely disqualify too many games where winning 2 in a row is enough.
Charts
The data is from split 1 of the regular season of every region, some issues are presented with this data set, for example every team didn’t play each other, some bad teams like FURIA and MIBR who didn’t play each other might’ve skewed the Americas data set by being unable to play consistently competitive maps against good teams and increased the average amount of rounds needed to win 2 rounds in a row. Some maps were also just unpopular in some regions, Americas notably did not play a lot of Ascent, this is also dependent on which side wins pistol, Lotus wins a lot of attack sided pistol rounds so there just isn’t much data on how many rounds it takes to win 2 in a row if you actually lose attack sided pistol. You can find all the data I collected here.
Regionally there’s some interesting things here like in Americas it’s very difficult to stop the enemy team from snowballing on Sunset if you’re on defense or how in EMEA you can snowball Icebox attack quite significantly, I have no idea why that might be the case but it could be something interesting to investigate.
Ultimately though it seems like snowballing is region dependent, a map that snowballs hard in one region doesn’t seem to snowball the same in other regions. In fact if you combined all the regions to get the average number of rounds needed to win 2 rounds in a row globally, it’s like snowballing doesn’t exist, most maps sit within that 5-6 rounds needed range regardless of side which means the team that does win pistol can only snowball about 3-4 rounds on average so does this mean VALORANT isn’t as snowbally as we think?
Well even disregarding the inherent issues with the data set, we can’t assume that winning 2 rounds results in a competitive half, we’ve seen teams win 2 rounds in a row early on in a half and then completely lose out, all this really does tell us is that teams are winning 2 rounds in a row relatively early on in a half which means 2 sequential rounds should be enough to stop a snowball and at the very least give themselves a chance to play a competitive half. But there is another issue I haven’t addressed yet.
How Many Teams Actually Win 2 Rounds in a Row?
We’ve been talking a lot about winning 2 rounds in a row but how many teams failed to actually do that?
Now this number is inflated to an extant because you don’t play both 12 rounds in both halfs, it’s common to see a team go into the 2nd half only needing 4-5 rounds to win and in those scenarios you’re probably not going to see a team win 2 rounds in a row that half. However even with that, a quarter of all halfs played in each region has a team that is unable to win 2 rounds in a row which is likely a significant reason why the game feels so snowbally right now.
Conclusion & Further Investigation
So how snowbally is VALORANT currently? Simultaneously very and also not really, I see it this way, if you actually win 2 rounds in a row and stop the enemies team snowball it probably happens early on in the half and you give yourself a pretty decent chance to play out a competitive half, the hard part is actually winning 2 rounds in a row after losing pistol. I am curious as to why those 2 rounds can be so difficult to win back to back and I think there’s a lot of room to take a deeper look around how good teams are snowballing and also how they’re stopping snowballing, especially around ultimates and how teams prioritize them and also use them. I’m also interested in how Shanghai plays out because to me it’s clear that snowballing is very regional, each region has their maps and sides that are difficult to stop snowballing from occurring but when looking at it globally snowballing is very minimal so I’m also interested if Shanghai’s chart ends up looking similar to the global one or if it fits one of the regional charts, I may end up doing a follow up post that looks into these things a bit more depth.