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Riot Games announced late on 10th August that the competitive queues are back up and running in Valorant after being disabled for over five hours. Riot shut down competitive queues in Valorant over a flash exploit that was bypassing the flash effect from agent abilities. Players were able to turn off the flash effect in Valorant through an in-game setting and the exploit was quickly gaining traction in the community over the course of the day. However, after learning about the exploit, the company immediately shut down ranked and got to work to ensure the competitive integrity of Valorant remains intact.
Sentinels’ Zellsis posted a video about the flash exploit
The flash exploit got a lot of attention from Valorant players after Sentinels' Jordan “Zellsis” Montemurro posted a video showing how players could bypass the flash effects in the game, both from allies and enemies. Zellsis explained that this could be done by navigating to the general settings in-game, scrolling down to the “Other” category, and turning on the “Hide User Interface In Game” option.
Enabling this setting hid the entire interface of the game including the agent icons, health bar, abilities panel, and also the mini-map on the corner. Along with these, the setting allowed players to completely play around flashes since they do not blind them anymore. Riot Games did not talk about how long the flash exploit has been around in the game for players to abuse. It is also unclear if the exploit allowed players to not sustain the effects of nearsightedness or concussions.
In his video, Zellsis said, “No wonder my flashes don’t ever fu**** work,” after testing out the flash exploit with his allies and enemies.
After noticing that the competitive queues were disabled, Zellsis tweeted, “Ever since getting verified, I feel like I control the world.” Notably, the player only recently got verified on Twitter on 4th August.
Now that Riot Games has patched the flash exploit, enabling the “Hide User Interface In Game” option no longer prevents players from bypassing the flash effects.
After seeing the company’s swift reaction to the exploit and the bug fix, the Valorant community has been praising it. A Twitter user wrote, “If this bug was in Rainbow Six, Ubisoft would have just left it in until the following season. People like to clown on Riot but at least they actually take care of their games.”
