Riot Games halts Valorant competitive queuing as new game-breaking flash bypass bug shows up with patch 5.03

Valorant 5.03 patch made arrived in the game yesterday and brought loads of changes along with it. These include an update to the in-game engine with Unreal 4.26 and the famous Chamber nerfs.

The Chamber nerf has been talked about in the community for a long time, ever since the patch notes came out. However, a new topic has popped up in the community other than Chamber: the major flash bypass bug.

When updating the engine for the shooter game, Riot Games addressed some issues regarding the user interface and warned players to expect bugs. In case anyone encountered a problem, the developers also advised players to submit bug reports so that they could fix them.

The day after the launch of the new patch, players have already discovered a game-breaking bug that affects flashes, resulting in the disabling of competitive queuing in Valorant for the moment.

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Valorant competitive queue gets disabled as players discover flash bypassing

Flashes in Valorant are one of the most important things that players use to gain an advantage on enemies. By temporarily disrupting and blocking the enemy's line of sight, players can easily win gun fights by outplaying them.

However, after the 5.03 patch, which was released on August 9, 2022, this utility has been invalidated courtesy of a bug. Moreover, this bug can be triggered very easily, and many players have employed it to gain an unfair advantage.

To use this bug, all that Valorant players had to do was to turn on the Hide User Interface option in the settings. By doing so, players were also disabling flashes that somehow got interconnected with the in-game HUD.

Any agent that has flashes like Phoenix, KAY/O, and Yoru has been completely rendered useless, courtesy of this game-breaking bug.

Riot Games has been pretty swift in taking a huge step and stopping most people from getting unfair victories. While competitive queuing is disabled for the game currently, players can still enjoy Valorant by playing other game modes.

Riot Games hasn't mentioned how long it will take to fix the bug; however, it can be expected to happen soon. Instead of waiting two weeks for a major patch update, Riot Games will be rolling out a hotfix for the issue to resume competitive queueing for the players.

That said, as of now, players will have to be patient with the developers as they work to fix the problem. When the issue is taken care of, Riot Games will share the news on their Twitter and other social handles so that players know that things are back to normal again.