Should Valorant remove the delay before a player is accurate during strafing?

Since its release, Valorant has been through its fair share of bugs and glitches that have needed repair work.

Over the initial months after Valorant's beta release, there have been many complaints, leading to changes applied in the gameplay and gunfight system of Valorant. One such change is the delay before a player is accurate after running to a stop.

A fair number of closed-beta users reported that they had been facing opponents who could run and shoot an accurate headshot. However, this was not what used to actually happen.

Valorant had a minimal delay before a player could completely come to a stop. Players, who were experienced in the FPS genre, had accustomed themselves to the use of 'counter-strafing,' which looked as if it was Run and Gun.

For the folks out there unaware of the term, counter-strafing is a technique to reduce the moving speed to a complete stop much quicker than usual. This was done with the help of the opposite directional key, which forced the moving character to reduce its speed much faster.

This led to a significant issue during the gunfights, known as 'peeker's advantage.'

Relyks from Cloud 9 has shown a handful of demonstrations and explained why patch 0.5 was a disaster to the competitiveness of Valorant:

The solution to the peeker's advantage might have broken the gunfight system in Valorant

Peeker's advantage is when an aggressive player peeks and successfully shoots a defender holding an angle before the defender can react.

This was an issue during Valorant's beta, where players used to complain about getting one-tapped to the head before them being aware. Therefore, Riot Games came up with a solution in the Valorant patch 0.5 to add a slight delay before a player regains complete accuracy:

The Valorant patch update 0.5 pertaining to accuracy

However, this lowered the skill ceiling more. Players who were used to counter-strafing could no longer use it to their advantage due to the delay, even after being at a full stop.

A Reddit user, Appropriate-Lemon929, opened up about the issue in a post:

"In beta, there were a lot of complaints about running headshots, so Riot introduced a slight delay between stopping moving and being able to shoot accurately. It was a garbage bandaid fix to try and placate all the whiners who got shot on fair and square, but because they got counter-strafe one-tapped, they think it's run and gun."

However, with Valorant boosting its capability to give a platform to players who are new to the FPS genre, they might have brought down the gunning skill ceiling a bit too much. But with six months already passed, they might try increasing the barrier to add more competitiveness, considering this game is also an esport.

The user continued:

"I think the player base has matured enough that we can go back to that crisp feeling counter-strafing without everyone whining about how they are running headshot."

Being slowed down while getting shot at might increase accuracy in Valorant

Another issue with the movement and gunning mechanism is the walking accuracy when being shot at in Valorant.

When a player is moving and getting shot, it will slow down his/her movement speed to a point where the character enters the walking accuracy mode. This would mean that a player shooting a moving opponent will soon be at an aiming disadvantage if the opponent decides to hit back.

A user, singlereject, put it in a logical sense in the post mentioned above:

"It turns into a case of: okay, I successfully hit the person sprinting around a corner running and gunning, but now that I tagged him, he successfully headshots me as he continues to hold down the movement key because he got walking accuracy from me tagging him. im okay with SMG's, shotguns, pistols all being run and gunnable since they can't one-tap someone, but rifles can, and it's INSANELY frustrating to get one-tapped by someone who got off a lucky shot."

The above issues have caused the quality of the game to drastically decrease in Valorant. However, Riot might be hesitant to apply such massive changes to the mechanics after all these months. Considering it has just been five months since the release, it has not been that long.

For a game like CS: GO, it's not how it used to be initially, but how it got developed over the years after its release. Therefore, Riot might consider these changes to bring a little more depth to the game and make it a bit more realistic.

Edited by Ravi Iyer