Let's talk about this bug. It should have never reached players, but it does have an interesting root cause and game dev lesson. The defect was live for several hours on Tuesday morning in NA, LATAM, and BR after we patched 1.11. We rolled back to 1.10 to mitigate. (1/21) https://twitter.com/JoshNissan/status/1321142916262211584

Shortly after the 1.11 patch went out we started receiving reports of issues with smokes and nearsight effects. Big thanks to @EthanBenard, @JoshNissan, and @Hiko for sharing video immediately. We're tremendously appreciative for help tracking down issues we miss. (2/21)

The videos were excellent for narrowing in on the problem. Hiko's clip showed that he saw Steel being impacted by the bug while spectating. This detail let us immediately prune a significant set of possible root causes from consideration. So what actually happened here? (3/21)

I'll break down all the contributing factors, but concisely: "Character nearsight/smoke meshes (a) are corrupt for the remainder of the match after being killed by the Singularity finisher (b) when fast respawn is enabled (c)." (4/21)

(a) First let's talk about how nearsight effects work in VALORANT. Nearsight effects are implemented using meshes attached to the player character. Most of the time these meshes are invisible. Think of it like wearing transparent sunglasses all the time... (5/21)

... and when you're hit with a nearsight effect like Omen's Paranoia, tunable parameters that control the look are set and these meshes become visible. This applies the nearsight effect to the debuffed player's perspective. (6/21)

(b) Finishers are special effects from gun skins that trigger when a gun with the skin gets the final kill of the round. These can be super flashy as there's no possibility of further combat. The Singularity skin's finisher sucks the victim into a black hole. (7/21)

Part of creating this effect involves Singularity's finisher manipulating the victim player's character meshes. This manipulation is destructive; the meshes are radically changed. You might see where this is going... more later. (8/21)

(c) Creating a new character from scratch is slow -- potentially tens of milliseconds. To put that in perspective, at 200 FPS each frame is only 5 ms. Building a new character is potentially multiple frames of work by itself. (9/21)

In bomb game mode this slowness is generally acceptable because characters are usually only created between rounds (with some exceptions like Sage's ultimate). In deathmatch this approach is a hard blocker. The game would be a hitchy mess. (10/21)

For deathmatch we built new "fast respawn" tech that resets character state back to its initial values rather than completely building the character from scratch. This is much, much faster. (11/21)

Fast respawn is currently enabled in Spike Rush and Deathmatch. It will eventually be enabled in our bomb game mode for better performance on cases like the Sage ultimate and also for maintainability; keeping two paths is an ongoing development tax. (12/21)

Now that we have all the pieces involved, we can talk about what actually happened. We turned on fast respawn in bomb game mode in 1.11, and we missed the critical interaction between fast respawn and the Singularity finisher. (13/21)

The Singularity finisher was making destructive modifications to more character meshes than required, including nearsight meshes. This is safe with the legacy respawn path because the character is fully rebuilt next round. Fast respawn was not resetting nearsight meshes. (14/21)

In bomb game mode it is only possible to briefly see this defect if you die to a Singularity finisher while nearsighted, and it fixes itself automatically in the next round. It can't occur in Deathmatch because there are no abilities or finishers in Deathmatch. (15/21)

The bug can occur in Spike Rush, but it's hard to hit. There aren't many rounds in Spike Rush, and a player has to randomly get a weapon with a fully leveled up Singularity skin and then get the finisher to put a player in a bad state for subsequent rounds. (16/21)

With fast respawn enabled in bomb game mode, once you die to the Singularity finisher, you can reproduce weird behaviors with smokes and nearsights (big Sage texture, immunity, etc.) for the rest of the match. (17/21)

The higher number of rounds in bomb game mode makes this quite common in matches where players are using weapons with the fully upgraded Singularity skin. (18/21)

We missed the interaction between nearsight abilities, finishers, and fast respawn. Complexity between game features is combinatorial; every permutation of interactions between features is an opportunity for something to go wrong. (19/21)

In the updated 1.11 build we've turned respawn off in bomb game mode to mitigate this issue. In 1.12 we're adjusting the implementation of the Singularity finisher and fast respawn will reset nearsight meshes. This will fix Spike Rush. (20/21)

We'll be doing a full validation pass across all of our finishers and fast respawn before we turn it back on in bomb game mode. (21/21)