Yesterday, Theodor “in0X” Bjornsson, The Head Coach for the TSM FTX Academy Valorant team, reported the existence of a Valorant Coaching bug which shows the position of the enemy team in the minimap.
In his Tweet, he shared a video of the team playing a scrim where you can see the yellow dots blinking, which are the positional indicators of the enemies. As you follow the video, you can see that the yellow indicators are quite accurate and can break the game’s competitive integrity.
Right now, there is no indicator of how the bug is triggered and restarting the game does fix it, but the bug has often occurred in scrims and official matches. Ian Harding V1’s Coach also experienced a variant of the same bug during the VCT, but it was only for enemies seen by the team.
As reported by George Geddes, many coaches from EMEA and NA have experienced some variant of this bug.
The most recent one happened at the VCT Playoffs, where NRG faced Faze Clan in the Lower bracket semifinals, where Josh “JoshRT” Lee experienced a variation of the coaching Bug. After immediately reporting the same to Riot, he was asked to restart the game, and the match continued.
Josh has also mentioned that the Riot team has been working on a hotfix for the issue. There is no indicator for why or how one can experience the bug. Still, it has been in Valorant for a while, with the first instance reported by the Akrew Coach Salah, who experienced it for both the official matchups but reported it immediately.
A similar instant was reported by GenG Jaxsen, where the game designer Penguin commented on fixing the bug.
The existence of the bug is fine for large-scale, Riot Sponsored events where there exists a referee who monitors the voice communications and coaches monitor closely. But in the case of smaller events or events with a large number of participants monitoring coaches becomes tough, resulting in unfair advantages provided to the teams.
With no replay system in Valorant, there is no way Riot can investigate the coaching bug and if the coaches used it at lower-tier tournaments. For now, Riot is working on fixing it, and the existence of Referees at the highest stage of events ensures nothing as such happens.
Read about the latest patch, latest map, professional scene and more..
