Riot has plans to deal with the hit registration issues in Valorant

Hit registration has been a hot topic in Valorant since the beta. A game that is so determined to be competitive needs to be pixel perfect when it comes to gameplay integrity. The recent release of a new agent and battle pass for the beginning of Act II only added fuel to the frustration fire. However, Riot Games has a team working on game systems, and it believes hit registration is in a good spot. The team has identified a different issue which they believe is the real source of frustration for players.

No, it isn’t their pessimistic attitude. It’s an issue of correctness vs. clarity. Correctness is what we would call hit registration. When you fire a shot, does the hit register where it was supposed to? If the bullet hits a player in the head, it should register as a headshot. If it doesn’t, you have a hit registration issue. Clarity is the representation of hit registration to players. If clarity is working well, you should see headshots hit enemies in the head and shots on the arm hitting the arm.

This is a clarity issue. The headshot registered, but the visual was off.

Valorant has received a lot of reports dealing with issues of hit registration, with a large spike during the beta patch 0.50 period. After delving through the reports, videos, and some extended internal testing, the team only found a few outlying hit registration bugs. This led them to the discovery that Valorant has a hit clarity issue.

If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of how hit registration works, you can check out the post on the Valorant website.

Here’s the plan

One option is to have the blood and sparks you see when you register a shot spawn on the character’s position and follow their movement. The big downside to this change is that hit visuals may move behind cover. This will prevent you from seeing when you land shots on enemies and lose vital information.

The other solution is to have multiple particle effects display when shots register. Some would follow the character, while others would remain in place for the shooter to identify hits. However, Riot is concerned this might cause confusion if the server and client simulations ever disagree on the outcome of a shot.

The post from the Valorant team ends by assuring players they are working on more solutions. It also urges players to continue providing feedback, because they are listening.