Strafing bots in VALORANT’s Practice Range have suddenly become a bit too mobile, and while that’s great for warming up before a ranked match, players are having a hard time taking them down.
In a Reddit post dated Oct. 5, a player named u/iAmSyther reported how annoyingly difficult it is to hit a strafing bot in the Practice Range. The slow-mo clip showed that the player had their crosshair on the bot’s head but still managed to miss the shots, which is a little outrageous.
While the post was meant to highlight the registering inconsistency of bullets, several players were taken aback by the bot’s increased movement. “Brother, I’ve been on VALORANT for more than a year, played strafe a lot of times. Omg, this is the first time I’m seeing this,” one player said, referring to how the bot was running from right to left. Honestly, like many, I was surprised too.
Looks like Riot Games updated the Practice Range bots to move more, but it left out the information from the patch notes. Well, I’m sure most of us are glad about this surprise change because it’s great for practice. The fact that players are unable to hit the bots is a bit perplexing, however.
“I’m pretty sure there is some stupid latency with the bot’s animation right now, I was using it as warm-up today, and there was definitely something off,” one player reported.
Another player tried explaining the issue technically, saying why the player’s system variables (latency, ping) coupled with VALORANT’s 128-tick servers might have a role to play here. “What you see is interpolated gameplay from the server. The bot is not actually there, he’s a little bit ahead,” they said, and it does make sense.
Right after Patch 7.07 dropped on Oct. 3, I came across multiple similar reports where players were unable to consistently kill bots in the Practice Range. So it’s possible that the update might have actually broken a few things on the server’s side, and if so, Riot should take note before it makes more players question their skills.
Isn’t VALORANT’s ranked enough of a frustrating aim game already, that Practice Range bots had to join in too?
