For the past couple hours, VALORANT's competitive queue has been disabled without any official explanation, and players think it's because of a gamebreaking bug rendering flashes useless.

What Happened to VALORANT Competitive Queue?

Around 4:00 AM of August 10, 2022, VALORANT's competitive queue was disabled on the Asia Pacific (APAC), EU, and OCE servers, leaving players baffled. At around the same time, a bug report was posted on the r/VALORANT official bug megathread.

This comes on the same day that the VALORANT Patch 5.03 shipped.

The bug report details how to make flashes useless, whether it's from your ally, enemy, or even self. All you have to do is to switch the “Hide User Interface In Game” to on, and you'll be impervious to being blinded. According to the post, the reproduction rate is 100%, as long as you follow the singular step. A couple videos of the recreation of this bug were also posted:

The patch notes for VALORANT Patch 5.03 declared that the game recently updated its engine to Unreal Engine 4.26, which “improves the tool set available to our developers in many ways, however this change will likely go unnoticed by you, as the goal of any Engine update is to happen under the radar.” They even mentioned that some known issues were mostly because the “UI is misbehaving.”

Unfortunately, it wasn't as subtle as they hoped. Obviously, being immune to being flashed damages the competitive integrity of the game, and so (supposedly) Riot disabled Competitive Queues due to this. If you really wanna scratch your shooter itch, Unrated can still be played, as well as the other game modes like Spike Rush, Replication, and Deathmatch.

As of the time of writing, Riot Games has not officially acknowledged the bug in any way, or made an announcement when the queues would be back.


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