How to easily appear offline in Valorant

Being a competitive multiplayer shooter, Valorant lets players add friends and create a preset team before entering a match. However, at times, teaming up with friends may not seem like the best choice, particularly when you want to practice or solo queue.

Like most multiplayer titles, Valorant tags players with an activity status depending on whether they are available or offline, thus reducing confusion amongst their friends. That said, this system isn't flexible and often disturbs those who want to be left alone.

Unfortunately, there is no official method in Valorant to manually switch one's activity status. However, players can choose to download a third-party application to help their cause.

This article will elaborate on how to set up the external application, Deceive, and how to use it to appear offline in Riot's tactical shooter.

Here's how you can easily appear offline in Valorant and avoid any party invites

Valorant assigns three activity statuses: Available, Away, and Offline. A player is marked as 'Available' when he/she launches the game and maintains constant activity. If you don't exit the game and avoid any activity, it will mark you as 'Away', which basically denotes an AFK status. Lastly, if there is no instance of the game running on your system, you will be shown as 'Offline'.

Available and Away statuses will give your friends the impression that you are online or near your system. To avoid receiving requests or whispers, you'll need your in-game status to appear Offline in Valorant. The best way to do this is to 'Deceive' the players in your friend list.

How to use Deceive?

Deceive is a third-party application that will help you avoid team-up requests and go solo in the game. Follow the steps below to install and set up the application:

Go to the official Deceive page which is hosted on GitHub [github.com/molenzwiebel/Deceive/releases].
Scroll down and find the Deceive.exe under the Assets section. Click on it to initiate the download process.
Once downloaded, open the application. Next, you will be asked to choose the game you want to run Deceive with. Choose Valorant. You can also ask the application to remember this choice by checking the box.
The game will now launch and you'll see a "Deceive Active" friend box at the end or at the top of your active friend list. This means that the application is now masking your in-game activity status.

Deceive can also be used with League of Legends and Legends of Runeterra. As of now, it seems to be a safe application. None of its users have reported any instances of a ban. This is because Deceive doesn't modify any in-game data or interact with Riot Vanguard.

Players have knowingly used many applications like trackers and crosshair modifiers to create personalized in-game experiences. Even though Riot Games doesn't promote third-party app usage, some external applications have proven to be fairly safe.

Nevertheless, it is important to remain cautious and understand the possible consequences of using external applications with Valorant. Even though multiple creators and users have deemed Deceive to be a safe solution, one should download it at their own discretion.