The Valorant Competitive queue was promptly put on hold after the ‘Flash Exploit’ bug surfaced
in the game, thus forcing Riot to shut down competitive queues in the game. Through an in-
game setting, players in Valorant were able to disable the flash effect, which gathered a lot of
attention in the community. This prompted developers from Riot Games to look into the issue
and take effective actions in order to prevent tarnishing Valorant's fair-play reputation.

The flash exploit is basically where a player “bypasses the flash effect from agent abilities” and
could be put to use in the matches by changing one particular setting in Valorant - the Hide User
Interface in-game. Enabling this would result in rendering flashes from agents ineffective.

A flash is a projectile or a deployable tactical object that can be launched or placed in a
particular place, which will explode at some point in the match. Any agent in its line of sight will
be affected by a flash when it explodes, reducing the sight and gradually its effect vanishes.
As the flashes stopped working after this glitch made its way into the competitive queues, it
created a lot of confusion and brought down the fair play in the games. This exploit got even
more attention after Jordan Zellsis Montemurro from the Sentinels uploaded a video
demonstrating how players might get around the flash effects in the game. According to him, the
‘Hide User Interface in-game’ option was the reason behind this exploit which can be enabled
by going to the general settings in the game, scrolling down to the ‘Other’ category, and
selecting that particular setting.

However, before this glitch could gain more attention and disrupt the game, Riot took charge to
fix it. This initially led them to provide a green signal to the competitive queues and it was
brought back only after the issue was dealt with. The Valorant community appreciated the
efforts the developers took for their quick response in fixing the bug.