With the start of Valorant's closed beta today, viewers from all over the world turned out in record setting numbers on Twitch. While some members of the community wanted to check out the gameplay or support their favorite channels, others hoped to get lucky and access the beta for themselves. But due to multiple problems by the end of day 1, those dreams will have to wait.
For the majority of players, getting into the closed beta involves the simple task of watching Valorant streams that have drops enabled. However, fans also need to have both a Riot and Twitch account linked together before they can obtain a code for themselves. With the number of codes available far from enough to satisfy the community, further difficulties complicated the distribution of closed beta access today.
Several hours after Valorant's early morning launch, people began running into error 43 which indicated a connection problem and urged them to restart the game client. Following the steps, however, still wouldn't let players find matches or even access the main menu. As a result, Riot Games deployed multiple fixes and even paused stream drops while further diagnosing server issues. With the first day drawing to a close, Riot decided to again pause drops during the evening.
But viewers shouldn't be alarmed about their chances decreasing due to the pause. The tweet elaborates that everyone can still earn a Valorant code from specific streams, they just won't be given out until server issues are identified and resolved. Furthermore, later responses indicated that stream drops would start up once again tomorrow morning after some adjustments to the servers.
Considering the strain just from today, pausing drops even during non-peak hours is the right move. With the attention generated from just today's streams, even more of the Twitch community should be tuning in for tomorrow's broadcast. Keeping that in mind, the last thing Riot wants is another wave of players crashing its game during the middle of the day.
Although it may take a little longer for most fans to get access, they can still watch and learn from many pros and streamers currently playing the game when available. A lot can still change from the closed beta to official release, especially the different Agents, but the game should be free of issues plaguing it right now by the time it launches.
Valorant is scheduled to release during Summer 2020.