Riot Games has temporarily disabled Harbor, the latest VALORANT Agent, in competitive queues after players noticed that his ultimate ability was causing major lag spikes in some matches. It turns out that the Indian Agent's ultimate —called Reckoning—is just too much for servers to handle in some areas: The huge visual effect it triggers can slow down servers.
The official VALORANT Twitter account explained why they disabled Harbor: "Harbor's ultimate ability is creating unintentional lag spikes in some cases. We're disabling the Agent in Competitive queue for now. Stay posted for any updates."
Although Harbor has been disabled out of VALORANT's competitive queue for now, players can still select him in other modes like Deathmatch and Spike Rush (as well as custom games).
Riot is already at work fixing Harbor, so expect him to return to the competitive queue soon. This isn't the first time Riot has had to disable a VALORANT Agent. Back in 2020, an update accidentally made Omen so powerful that they had to remove him from play for a full day so Riot could rebalance him.
Harbor, a Controller Agent who has defensive water manipulation abilities, was released in Episode 5, Act 3, which launched in October 2022. He's voiced by Sunil Malhotra, but he's currently not seeing much play in the game's esports scene. It's still as mystery as to why his ultimate is causing such major lag spikes, since the issue appears to affect server ping rather than GPU rendering.
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