Riot Games respond to major Valorant hit reg issues

Riot Games have responded to the widespread hit registration issues that have been plaguing Valorant following the 0.50 patch that rolled out on May 12.

Hit registration in first-person shooters is as essential as your mouse and keyboard. Without your bullets registering on the intended target, there is literally almost no way of earning kills.

And following the Valorant closed beta 0.50 patch, there have been multiple accounts of players struggling with just that, leaving players outraged at the inconsistencies emerging in the tactical shooter that wants to rival CS:GO.

Riot Games

Hit registration is a player’s way of differentiating between bullets missed and bullets landed on target.

The 0.50 update was the largest to-date; giving players Agent changes, map changes and a plethora of minor bug fixes. As a consequence, the patch has also had a detrimental effect on players’ frame rate — with Riot vowing to fix the issue in an upcoming patch.

• Read more: Riot Games dev provides update on Valorant FPS issues

Now a Riot developer (who is responsible for hit registration in Valorant) has responded to a thread outlining the multiple complaints players have had since May 12 — detailing two potential causes at the root of player’s hit reg woes.

Firstly, ‘Riot_Sobey’ theorized that the adjustments made to movement accuracy could well be affecting how players are perceiving bullet tracers.

This means that, according to Sobey, players need to re-learn the timings from stopping and shooting.

A second point that the developer raised is that the sparks that fly-off from bullet impact on a player model are the same color as tracers, which in turn make it “hard to see where the tracer is going through the spark impact.”

• Read more: Valorant players slam Riot for not supporting Rated solo-queue

While the majority of Sobey’s response essentially debunked widely reported hit registration issues that players have been reporting, they did also explain that they will continue to investigate the problem on the assumption that there “may still be a hitreg problem hiding in there somewhere.”

Yet in response to the Riot dev’s lengthy statement, one Redditor provided an example of a clip where a player is not moving and their bullets seemingly pass straight through their foe.

So while Riot are actively investigating the issue, it appears that the best advice for players is to tweak their existing muscle memory and relearn the time-to-shoot mechanic from scratch. Time to get in the Practice Range…