VALORANT Patch 6.03: Bind's return, Sova Recon Bolt updates, and AFK queue dodging

Last week, the news of Icebox’s departure from the map pool was broken to the VALORANT community which received an extremely contrasting variety of reactions. However, Riot did good to soften the blow with the announcement of Bind’s return. Apart from this change, VALORANT patch 6.07 will also introduce updates to Sova’s recon bolt and a revamped AFK system.

VALORANT patch notes 6.06: Agent Updates

Sova:

• Recon Bolt (E) has been updated to correctly appear when playing with Bloom (graphical effect that makes things brighter) turned off.
• Recon Bolt’s scanning VFX has been updated to be more visible as it travels through the world.
• Its model has also been increased in size to represent its hitbox more accurately. However, the collision as it travels is unchanged.

UI Indicators:

Here are the changes introduces to establish consistency in UI indicators across all agents:

• Reyna
  • Yellow indicator removed from Leer (C)
• KAY/O
  • Critical danger indicator added to FRAG/ment (C)
• Skye
  • Yellow indicator removed from Seekers (X)
• Killjoy
  • Yellow indicator removed from Alarmbot (E)
• Chamber
  • Yellow indicator removed from Trademark (C)

Map Updates:

Bind has officially returned replacing Icebox in the map pool with its return to Competitive Queue scheduled for Patch 6.08, starting April 25. However, it is not the same version of the map that was removed earlier in the year. It has been significantly reworked to improve gameplay experience.

AFK and Queue Dodging:

Queue dodging, which refers to the act of joining a queue for a game and then suddenly leaving the queue, such as timing out in agent selection was cited by Riot as a highly disruptive behavior emerging as the most prevalent offense that adversely affects gameplay participation. This act negatively impacts players' experience by increasing the wait time to get into a game.

Whereas being AFK refers to being present in the match, but not actively participating or being detected as a bot, yet another disruptive behavior that can affect team gameplay. To combat these issues, Riot has introduced the following penalties:

• The amount of Ranked Rating loss for repeated ranked queue dodging has been increased
• We’re introducing a 1 day ranked restriction for people who frequently take part in excessive AFK behavior, sooner than previously introduced ranked restrictions.

Bug Fixes:

Agents

• Projectiles will now reset their blue travel trail when teleporting, removing the line that connects from teleporter to teleporter. This trail is only visible to allies.

Gameplay Systems

• Fixed a bug where Agents are able to drop both primary and secondary weapons while planting or defusing the Spike.
• Fixed a bug in the minimap where teleport abilities can reveal an Agent’s out-of-sight minimap location when under packet loss.
• Fixed an issue where some players’ outline/fresnel were displayed even when “Hide Outlines and Fresnel” setting was enabled.
• Fixed a bug (previously fixed in 3.10 but cases of this issue were recently reported) where sometimes outgoing packet send rate was lower than intended for game clients running at > 128 FPS.
• Fixed issues where vision cones of vertical wall-type abilities (Phoenix’s Blaze (C), Viper’s Toxic Screen (E), Harbor’s High Tide (E)) could flicker or distort on the minimap.

Social

• Fixed a bug where the social panel from the in-game options screen was sometimes getting stuck open (for example when you opened the social panel, closed the options screen, then opened the options screen again).
• Fixed a bug where when the in-game language is Arabic and you enter an English word first in a chat message, it would break the right-to-left format standard of text in Arabic.