All games suffer from bugs and errors, but some are too game-breaking to be taken lightly. Valorant is no different. Recently, players encountered a ping-spiking bug that’d only get triggered when Valorant character Harbor deploys his ultimate. Riot has quickly plucked the controller from the FPS game‘s ranked queues to tinker his Reckoning around the edges.
Harbor’s success rate so far had been underwhelming, which led the developer to reload his Cascade charges. In Valorant patch 5.10, the Indian fugitive received a significant buff in an additional waterfall, which caused a bizarre malfunction in his ultimate. Pings of all players within the Reckoning’s AoE were getting bombed with sky-high spikes, sometimes even 1000ms.
The spike would last for the duration of Harbor’s ult, which is nine seconds long. It was a consistent bug, causing visible distress among all players, even those with beastly builds. Fortunately, Riot quickly took notice and is now working to remedy the issue. However, it requires a trip to the workshop for Harbor, meaning he’s no longer playable.
“Harbor’s ultimate ability is creating unintentional lag spikes in some cases. We’re disabling the agent in the Competitive queue for now. Stay posted for any updates,” the developer announced.
It’s still being determined when Harbor will return to the queues, but it should take, at most, a few days. The agent recent buffs were expected to make him meta in Valorant, finally. Those excited to play the buffed Harbor will have to wait to dominate the competitive Valorant with double-cascade and a Reckoning that doesn’t stun the pings.
It’s worth noting that he’s only gone from the competitive mode. Casual players have yet to report any such bug in other Valorant modes, but it’d be best to avoid picking Harbor in unrated as well until a fix has been delivered.
While Harbor chills in the workshop, Viper could be your next go-to controller. So check out this Viper lineup for locking wins on Icebox and dominating your Valorant ranked games in episode 5, act 3.