Valorant devs get technical to explain Raze Showstopper bug, fix in the works

At one point Raze was the more infuriating Agent in the game of Valorant. In large part because of the design choice voiced by the developers, before the game was released, that stated that Agent's abilities "won't kill".

Queue the introduction of Raze during the beta who was packed with explosive abilities, the most egregious being her Showstopper. This one-hit-kill, sometimes one-hit-two or three kills, was annoying beyond belief, with little to counter getting blasted in the face with this.

Nerfs to her Showstopper, which made it longer to charge up before use and increased the sound of Raze's battle-cry before firing took the heat out of that particular situation. Reducing the blast radius and number of Paint Shell grenades she could carry also helped.

Raze's kit has consistently caused problems since her inclusion into Valorant. (Picture: Riot Games)

Raze is still one of the most-picked Agents across all ELOs but in a strange turn of events, you may start to feel sorry for Raze mains after you see a video posted by, Cloud9 White's Melanie "meL" Capone, taking a Showstopper almost to the face, and yet receive no damage.

can anyone explain this 🙂 pic.twitter.com/St1AooxOS5

— C9 meL (@mel_anji) February 10, 2021

The video went viral and came to the attention of Marcus Reid aka Riot Nu, Principal Software Engineer on Valorant. He confirmed that this is obviously a bug and went in-depth on the reason why it happened and what they are doing to fix it.

"Games are built on approximations of the real world for performance reasons. VALORANT doesn't simulate the physics of a real explosion," explained Reid. Adding, "This bug is a case where our approximation falls short."

He then goes on to explain that explosions in Valorant contain two elements: Inner radius and outer radius.

"Think of the inner radius as the center of the explosion. Players take full damage from the explosion within the inner radius and no damage outside the outer radius."

If players are between the inner and outer radius then damage is attributed based on the distance from the inner radius they are at the point of the explosion.

In this screenshot, the inner/outer radius sizes are visualized by the black and cyan spheres. (Picture: Riot Games)

Reid goes on to explain that at the point of an explosion in the game will try and chart a path to anyone who falls within the outer radius. If it succeeds damage will occur.

"This approach usually works," states Reid. However, "in very tight spaces like under the pallet in Mel's video, the visibility check fails and the player does not take damage."

This "problematic pallet" on Haven's B site created the perfect conditions for such a bug to occur. (Picture: Riot Games)

"The pallet effectively eats the explosion."

While there is no doubting that Riot is actively working on a fix, how they will do that is up in the air.

Reid explained: "The fix here is to either adjust the collision settings on the problematic pallet or to adjust the logic driving the visibility checks to better handle small spaces."

With competitive integrity at the absolute forefront of Valorant's design decisions and with the Valorant Champions Tour in full-swing Riot have two options; release a hotfix ASAP or, as they have in the past, remove Raze until a fix can be found.

We will keep you posted.