Riot responds to evidence of ‘critical failure’ in Valorant’s recoil

Riot Games responded to an analysis of Valorant’s recoil patterns that shows a possible desync between what the game displays and what the system registers, which could play a factor in the visual hit-reg issues people have encountered.

User ‘undervalued_gm’ and their team found issues with how the server interprets, and subsequently displays, the recoil of a weapon’s spray.

“This makes it effectively impossible to compensate for recoil correctly as the server will be shooting your gun in a different direction than what is displayed to your client,” undervalued_gm said.

They made it a point to clarify that their findings were not linked to spectator bugs or an issue dealing with ping. The method was tested for both North American and European regions, with results showing the same effect.

After holding down a prolonged spray in a game, the bug will ‘trigger’ which could make following bullet patterns affected and possibly desynced.

While players are trying to control the spray that’s shown on their monitor, the server is actually registering a different pattern for the same spray on its side, according to the findings.

• Read more: Valorant ping system set for major “tactical” overhaul

Multiple people chimed in with similar accounts of these ‘ghost bullets’ that seem to hit far off walls or objects when the visual of the spray pattern is somewhere else entirely.

Software Engineer at Riot Games who goes by ‘tehleach’ isn’t too familiar with the combat systems of Valorant, but said that undervalued_gm’s example of this bug with an Ares in practice mode could be stressing the respawn system, which could account for some of what’s seen.

“In this video, you can see the server tick rate fall off a cliff from 128 down to like 10-20,” tehleach said. “My suspicion is that the server is chugging hard to keep up with these respawns and its bullet processing is falling behind as a result.”

• Read more: How does Valorant Deathmatch work? Weapons, how to win, more

While tehleach couldn’t shed more light on the bigger issue, the dev did say that the Ares representation isn’t entirely accurate since the conditions aren’t representative of real gameplay.

Still, this is something that the heads at Riot Games could look at to see if it’s playing into the bigger issue of Valorant’s hit registration problems.