Players in Valorant are currently quite frustrated. Shots that clearly hit often deal no damage. The developers have now commented on this and provided an explanation.
What exactly is happening with Valorant right now? The Beta of Valorant received a major patch with Update 0.5, which among other things nerfed the heroine Sage and made numerous other changes.
However, one change that likely resulted from the patch is not well-received. Players are increasingly reporting on reddit that they have clearly hit their targets, but the game simply does not register the hits as damage. Numerous clips and images show that visible hit markers and sounds clearly indicate successful hits.
Yet the hit characters do not always reliably fall down dead as they should after such hits. Instead, hits often seem to go unregistered. It feels like players are shooting and hitting with blank cartridges.
What are the causes of the faulty hits?
What could be the problem? Currently, players are actively discussing on reddit what might be behind the issues:
- One player speculates that the hitboxes may have been altered. He hardly manages to get headshots anymore, but always seems to hit the shoulders instead. The fact that some characters have strange hitboxes has already been demonstrated with Jett as an example. Perhaps Riot has indeed fiddled around here and messed something up.
- Other players blame inadequate file transfer. Because if data packets are frequently lost during transfer, it may be that hits are registered in the client but never reach the server, resulting in no damage from hits.
What does Riot say? Recently, Riot addressed the players’ problems. A responsible developer mentioned in a reddit post two reasons that are causing seemingly missed shots:
- Changes were made to movement inaccuracy. Therefore, it sometimes looks like shots hit the enemy, but in reality, they did not. This is intentional, and players need to adapt and change their shooting behavior accordingly.
- The color of the tracers is the same as the colors of the hit markers. Therefore, it can be easily mistakenly assumed that one has hit.
Accordingly, one should actually hit reliably again when standing still. However, according to a player’s video evidence, this is not the case. And Riot also stated that there might still be a bug hiding somewhere. Nevertheless, it is probably a good idea to relearn your shooting and aiming behavior in Valorant.
Another problem that hopefully gets solved in Valorant soon is players who kill themselves to deny opponents money and victory rewards. This nuisance should quickly be addressed with an update to team kills. The community is also waiting for a statement from Riot Games on this matter.
