VALORANT’s slow load times have players begging for an iconic Counter-Strike feature

If you thought bugs were annoying, the loading speeds of VALORANT matches aren’t a pleasant thing to deal with, either. Besides shedding light on the outrageously slow load times, players are now demanding Riot Games to add one of Counter-Strike’s most popular features as a means to make the experience of loading into a match better.

In a Reddit post dated Oct. 11, a player named u/dergy621 shared their thoughts on VALORANT’s load speeds, flaming Riot for not optimizing the game’s most basic feature. “It’s crazy how much better looking and bigger scale multiplayer shooters can open and load you into a match in the same time it takes VALORANT just to load the main menu,” they said.

The player proceeded to use Overwatch 2 as an example, saying that Blizzard’s popular hero shooter has way more content than VALORANT, but its matches take less than 10 seconds to load up. 

Now, before the words “slow PC” or “bad internet” come to your mind, I’m going to stop you right there. Besides the fact that the player in question didn’t have a slow PC, I don’t think a slow PC or bad internet is a valid argument in this discussion anymore.

Players with well-built PCs and good internet just want to load faster into a match. Why should another player’s slow setup cause them trouble at all? 

Of course, most of the community supported the complaint, with players suggesting that VALORANT should at least have a warmup period like that of Counter-Strike before every Competitive or Unrated game. Players can practice gunfight before the rest of the lobby loads up to prevent boredom.  

VALORANT’s Deathmatch mode already has the warmup feature; all Riot needs to do is add it to ranked instead of having players stuck in a bland anticipatory screen. 

Staring at the game loading screen for minutes is definitely not fun, especially for solo queuers. But it’s not just the loading speeds for matches that are being flamed; players aren’t happy with the time it takes to launch VALORANT as well.

“First 2 years of the game, loaded in pretty quick 99% of the time. This last year, it’s completely different. After a certain patch, load times became absolute shit,” one player claimed. They and several others loved how CS2, Valve’s latest Counter-Strike game, offers lightning-fast load times for matches despite other optimization problems.

What went wrong with VALORANT’s load times over the past year is something only Riot can figure out and fix.