Riot devs respond to accusations that Ascent is "unplayable"

Since Valorant's release as a closed beta, the developers have been a frequent sight on Reddit, developer blogs and even their own live streams responding to complaints and suggestions while laying out their thought process and plans for the future.

Now with its official release which contains a brand new map, Ascent, and a new agent Reyna, and many millions of more players stress testing the games and mechanics it is perhaps no surprise that more problems will come up that need addressing.

One player has described Valorant's new map, Ascent, as "unplayable" ​​​​​​(Picture:  Riot Games)

Gamers are traditionally an eagle-eyed bunch, quick to spot errors and bugs, and even quicker to shine a light on them through social media and it looks like Ascent has already drawn the "ire" of some of the player base.

In a post on the Valorant subreddit titled "Ascent is unplayable" which shot straight to the top with over 1.9k upvotes Riot devs could be forgiven for thinking the worst. Their brand new map, on the day of launch, being deemed unplayable? You can already feel the calls being made to Riot HQ and the overtime being authorised.

• Read more: Valorant Ignition Battle Pass: Skins, cost, tier list and more

Thankfully for the developers and fans of the game, the unplayable tag was a bit tongue in cheek with post creator explaining that the cardinal error that Riot had made was one of mistranslation.

"The signboards outside B Main (Fish Market) say "Mercato del pesco", while it should be "Mercato del pescE" in Italian. Definitely unplayable," explained Noid_Reddit. "I will only rush A until it's fixed."  

The map was deemed unplayable because of this mistranslation. (Picture: Riot Games)

The post had clearly got the devs sweating as a member of the map team responsible for Quality assurance (QA), Fancypmcgee confirmed:

"As one of the QA folks on the maps team, this post made me panic so much when I clicked on the title."   

"Mercato Del Pesco" is Italian so the devs didn't get it totally wrong (the map is based partly on Venice), however, this translates as "peach market", and not the much more common sight of a "fish market" the map designers clearly had in mind.

According to another post, this is just one of many errors in translations that can be found throughout the map with Reddit user justemaaz listing all of them describing the Italian seen throughout the map as "an atrocity".

The QA tester didn't confirm if this will be getting changed in an upcoming patch, but based off the changes Riot have made in relation to player feedback, such as nerfing the Raze and Sage agents and redesigning parts of the Split map a change doesn't seem off the cards.

• Read more: Valorant v1.0 patch notes: Reyna, Ascent map, Spike Rush, Split redesign and Agent updates

Valorant was officially released on 2nd June and feedback has been largely positive, with the new map largely seen as an improvement on the ones that have come before it. Riot has confirmed that another major update is expected sometime during "the summer".