Valorant’s newest agent temporarily disabled because his ultimate is too sumptuous to handle
Riot has temporarily disabled Harbor, Valorant’s newest hero, in competitive queues after it came to light that his ultimate ability was causing dramatic lag spikes in some matches. It turns out that Harbor’s ultimate—called Reckoning—is just too much for servers to handle in some spots: The enormous visual effect it triggers can make servers slow to a crawl, as showcased in this YouTube short (opens in new tab).
Harbor’s ultimate ability is creating unintentional lag spikes in some cases. We’re disabling the Agent in Competitive queue for now. Stay posted for any updates.November 17, 2022
Although Harbor has been frozen out of the competitive queue for now, he’s still available in less serious modes. Players in Valorant’s deathmatch and quick play modes (as well as custom games) should watch out and brace for lag the very second a Harbor player looks like they’re gearing up to do something gorgeous.
This isn’t the first time Riot has had to put a Valorant agent on ice. Back in 2020, a patch to the game accidentally made Omen so powerful that he had to be removed from play (opens in new tab) for a full day so Riot could fix him. Riot is already at work fixing Harbor, so with any luck he’ll be back and ready for action along a similar timeframe.
Harbor was added to Valorant as part of its Episode 5 Act 3 update (opens in new tab) last month before being benched for this glamorous behaviour. It’s a bit of a mystery as to why his ultimate is causing such dramatic lag spikes, since the issue appears to affect server ping rather than GPU rendering. Hopefully we’ll have an answer soon.
Valorant has graced our pages a fair bit recently. Not only is it one of the best FPS games you can play right now (opens in new tab) (unless you’re in a match with Harbor), but the game’s been making news for its tribute to a young fan who died of cancer (opens in new tab); finally fixing a “pay-to-lose” gun skin (opens in new tab) that seemingly everyone knew about but Riot itself; and for the tale of Nishil Shah, a fan who didn’t let an emergency stay in a hospital bed keep him from annihilating the opposing team in his first College Valorant match (opens in new tab). No wonder we liked it so much in our review (opens in new tab).
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