Riot aims to make “clarity improvements” to VALORANT’s hit registration

Since VALORANT‘s beta release earlier this year, players have had numerous complaints about the game’s supposedly inconsistent hit registration. But today, Riot Games released a new developer’s blog post on the subject and how it plans to fix some of the identified issues.

Riot has been good about responding to bugs, glitches, and hit registration problems. But according to the developers, a majority of the issues that players are facing don’t have to do with hit reg. Instead, they have to do with the visual clarity of the shot.

“Upon closer review, the majority of the clips had issues not with correctness, but with clarity,” Riot said. “The shots were being properly processed, but the visual feedback of the shot was presenting a misleading outcome to the player.”

Two examples that Riot presented were when a player is shot when moving and when a player is shot while crouching. In both circumstances, players will see the visual effect of a hit in the wrong spot, such as a headshot on a crouching target.

Riot said a few different factors can mislead a player into believing they’ve hit a headshot. The hit visual effect, for example, could be delayed due to internet latency and might be displayed at the location of the original shot impact. Luckily, Riot has a few fixes in mind that could rectify these situations.

“One of the changes we’re iterating on is to have blood and spark effects spawn on the character’s current position, according to which part of their body got hit, and follow them as they move,” Riot said. “This greatly increases the clarity in situations like in case study two with crouching enemies, because the visual effect will move with their body movements.”

These changes likely need to come into place soon, especially with the VALORANT esports scene picking up steam with each passing month. These effects must stay clear and concise so that every player is sure about what outcome they’ll get from each shot they put out.