Riot Games forced to disable Valorant Competitive queue briefly to fix flash exploit

Riot Games announced on August 10 that the Valorant Competitive queue had been disabled due to an exploit that granted players immunity to flashes. Fortunately, the game-breaking exploit was fixed in just a few hours.

The exploit involved changing one setting in Valorant, the Hide User Interface In Game. Players just needed to set it to On and flashes from Breach, Phoenix, Skye, Yoru, and KAY/0 would no longer work as intended.

The setting is supposed to make the UI on a players screen invisible but because of the glitch it had the adverse effect of making enemy, and ally, flashes not work on their screen.

Zellsis discovered Valorant flash glitch

The exploit was brought to the public’s attention on Twitter through Sentinels player Jordan ‘Zellsis’ Montemurro.

The original tweet from Zellsis sits at over 20,000 likes and 1,000 retweets at the time of writing.

In the video, Zellsis changed his settings and had an ally Skye flash him as soon as the round started. His teammate could be seen fully flashed while Zellsis still had complete visibility. He then tested it with an enemy Phoenix flash and again he could still see perfectly fine after it went off in his line of sight.

His coach Shane ‘Rawkus’ Flaherty could be heard shouting in the background in disbelief.

Other Valorant players and personalities shared the exploit around throughout the day to spread the word and reach Riot Games for a fix.

Valorant Competitive queue returns hours later

With Riot soon made aware of the critical issue, Competitive queues were disabled. As a result, only casual games could be played for a brief period while devs worked on a fix.

Fortunately, fans didn’t have to wait too long. Just five hours after queues were taken down, Riot announced the exploit had been resolved and Competitive play was back online.