Because of an exploit that allows a player to disable the flash effect for themselves, Riot Games has temporarily disabled the competitive queue in VALORANT. This effectively nullifies the effects of the flash abilities that certain agents possess.
It has been brought to the attention of multiple players over the course of the last day that the flash effect may currently be disabled through a setting located in the game’s menu. It has been decided to keep the competitive queue inactive until the vulnerability has been patched.
The exploit, which gained a lot of attention after a video post about it was made by Sentinels’ VALORANT player Jordan “Zellsis” Montemurro, gives players the opportunity to entirely nullify the effects of any flash ability used by an ally or an adversary.
To accomplish this, while the game was in progress, one needed to navigate to the general settings menu, scroll down to the Other category, and turn on the “Hide User Interface In Game” option.
If you turned this setting on, the whole user interface would be hidden, including the minimap, the agent icons, your abilities, and your health, as well as the chat box. However, this would also have the effect of canceling out any flash effect, which would entirely disrupt the game and make it possible for players holding angles to remain fully unblinded by flashes.
It is unknown whether or whether the exploit was also able to cancel off consequences such as being nearsighted or concussed, and it is also unknown how long players in Competitive have been abusing the flaw.
Riot took swift action in response to the attention that was garnered to this game-breaking flaw by temporarily disabling the Competitive queue less than two hours after Zellsis posted about it. Riot has not provided an accurate estimate at this point regarding how long it will take to fix the issue. There are still several other game modes that are active right now.
