Valorant Beta Goes Live – But Boy, Has the Launch Been a Mess

• The Valorant closed beta launched earlier today.
• Frustrating errors and infuriating connection issues are preventing players from accessing the game.
• The Valorant category on Twitch currently has over 1.3 million viewers.

The Valorant closed beta is finally live, or at least, it’s supposed to be. The highly-anticipated soft-launch of Riot Games’ new 5vs5 character-based tactical shooter isn’t quite going to plan.

Those lucky enough to have picked up a key from last week’s Twitch drops as well as an army of eager streamers have hit several roadblocks gaining access to Valorant.

A Less Than Perfect Launch

As the official Valorant Twitter account reports :

Seeing an issue with number of logins on a specific service, and that’s causing errors down the line (particularly timeouts). The best solve is for us to fix it, so don’t keep trying to relog – we’re on it, one sec!

Fans watching Valorant streams on Twitch witnessed a rather uncommon sight as dozens of streamers temporarily went offline. The reason – the game’s anti-cheat system requires a restart to function correctly and grant access to the game .

A restart hasn’t solved the problem for all, though. Steamer summit1g, who currently has the largest Valorant audience of over 100,000 viewers, is stuck twiddling his thumbs as he waits for Riot Games to resolve the issues .

Others have reported a recurring “Error: 43” , which seemingly has the player stuck in a loop as the client constantly needs restarting only to produce a similar error message.

Valorant Is Massively Popular on Twitch

Regardless of the issues, there are currently 1.3 million viewers tuned into Valorant streams, besting the near 1 million that tuned in last week when the embargo on gameplay footage lifted.

Few would argue that there’s isn’t a ferocious appetite for Valorant. The issues are unlikely to dampen the excitement for the game, but the situation is certainly a departure from what Riot Games had in mind when it switched on the servers this morning.