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After several reports of a Valorant coaching bug surfaced in the last few days, Riot Games announced that the coaching bug has been patched. The company announced that the bug has been rectified on both the live servers and the esports servers. It was indicated that the Valorant coaching bug had been in the game since January and many coaches revealed that it had caused match delays and restarts. The community has been pondering whether this bug could have jeopardized the competitive integrity of the Valorant Champions Tour (VCT),
It was also made known that there were several variations of the bug but one of the prominent instances of the Valorant coaching bug was that sometimes coaches were able to see opponents move on the mini-map through small colored dots. It also allowed the coaches in the spectator slot to see the enemies' positions get updated every few seconds.
Developers patch the Valorant coaching bug
On 1st July, Riot Games wrote on Twitter, “Over the past 48 hours the VAL Dev team worked to deploy an update fixing a bug where the minimap would sporadically show opponents’ locations to coaches. This patch has been deployed to both live and esports servers and we'll continue to closely monitor the issue.”
The Valorant community started talking about the Valorant coaching bug after Team SoloMid (TSM) Academy Coach Theodor "in0X" Bjornsson took to Twitter to explain what the coach spectator bug looked like in-game on 30th June. He wrote, “*Look at my mini map* I think this is a huge liability for tournaments and needs to be resolved ASAP since coach monitoring is really loose.”
After Riot Games released the patch fix for the Valorant coaching bug, in0X wrote on Twitter, “Thank god, really impressed with the riot devs to fix this fast!”
According to accounts shared by Dot Esports, NRG’s coach Josh “JoshRT” Lee also experienced a variation of the bug during NRG’s match against FaZe on 25th June in the North American leg of the VCT. He reportedly notified a referee for Nerd Street Gamers who was the host of the tournament. After a long technical pause, the tournament organizers asked Josh to restart his game before the match resumed.
Notably, the Valorant coaching bug was acknowledged by a Riot Games employee who revealed that they had passed on the information regarding the bug internally. On 15th January, Game Designer penguin said, “Screenshots should be good enough, I'll follow up internally. Thanks!”
Riot Games has always responded to major bugs in its game titles and with a bug of this stature potentially threatening the competitive integrity of Valorant Esports, it was expected of Riot to take action swiftly.
