Valorant: Riot Games to introduce new 'stream-sniping' solutions in the coming months

Live video game streamers and content creators are often victims of the phenomenon called 'stream-sniping'. And it's prevalent in a lot of shooter games, including Valorant.

Stream-sniping is when a live streamer gets preemptively shot at by the opponent, as they know his/her location beforehand. This happens when the opponent is aware that the streamer is broadcasting his/her gameplay live, and tunes into the same to know their exact location.

Stream-sniping ruins the experience for not just the streamer, but the fans and audience as well. But this isn't something considered an offence in the traditional sense, like hacking, and reporting such behaviour will not get you very far.

Online personalities like Ninja, Shroud, Hiko, and Summit1g have all been victims of stream-sniping multiple times. Games like Fortnite Battle Royale, Call of Duty and Rainbow Six were all afflicted as well, and it seems like it's Valorant's turn this time around.

Though Twitch has taken some measures to solve the stream-sniping issue, the solutions from the platform are not nearly enough. Hence, according to some recent leaks by Valorant Leaks, it would seem that Riot Games is laying the groundwork for their own answer.

Valorant devs are coming up with a stream-sniping solution

New Strings:"FatalNotification_TransferInProgress": "Your session has ended due to account transfer in progress.","Privacy_RejectFriendRequests": "Auto-Reject Friend Requests","Privacy_AnonymizeSelf": "Hide My Name from Players Outside My Party",

— Valorant Leaks (@ValorLeaks) August 20, 2020

In a recent tweet, Valorant leaks confirmed that Riot has already started working on a solution for the stream-sniping issue, and a file has been data mined, which reads: "hide (your) name from players outside of (the) party."

A popular streamer being able to hide his/her name from the enemy team is perhaps one of the best solutions to stream-sniping.

But that being said, Valorant will not be the first game to implement this. As already mentioned, Epic Games' Fortnite too had this problem.

The more popular the game and its content creators got, the worse stream-sniping did, and Fortnite was able to successfully set up the 'hide name countermeasure'.

However, Valorant might go a step further in this regard, and the code line that reads, "Use generic names for players outside of party," suggests as much.