Riot has temporarily disabled Harbor in the competitive queue after it came to light that the ultimate ability of Valorant's new hero, Harbor, was causing dramatic lag spikes in some matches. Harbor's ultimate ability, "Reckoning", was found to be causing servers' throughput significantly: as shown in this YouTube short movie (opens in a new tab), the huge visual effects caused by this ultimate ability can slow a server to a crawl.

Harbor is frozen out of the competitive queue for now, but is still available in less serious modes; players in Valorant's Deathmatch and Quick Play modes (and custom games) will see Harbor players trying to do something gorgeous They should be aware of and be prepared for lag in moments when it looks like the Harbor player is trying to do something spectacular.

This is not the first time Riot has had to ice a Valorant agent; in 2020, a patch to the game accidentally made Omen so powerful that Riot had to take him out of play (open in new tab) for an entire day to fix him! Riot is already working on fixing Harbor, so with any luck Harbor will be back and active in a similar timeframe.

Harbor was added to Valorant last month as part of the Episode 5 Act 3 update (opens in new tab), but was benched for this flashy action. It's a bit of a mystery why his Ultimate would cause such a dramatic spike in lag, since the issue seems to affect server ping, not GPU rendering. Hopefully we will have an answer soon.

Valorant has graced our pages quite a bit lately. Not only has the game been in the news (opens in new tab), but also for its tribute to a young fan who died of cancer (opens in new tab); for finally fixing the "pay if you lose" gun skin that everyone, except Riot himself, seems to know about (opens in new tab). And the story of Nishil Shah, the fan who went from annihilating the opposing team in his first College Valorant match to being hospitalized in an emergency (opens in new tab). (Opens in new tab).