The release of Valorant’s RGX 11z Pro skin bundle with patch 3.07 caused a stir. Dubbed as the “pay to lose skins,” players experienced FPS drops in-game while using the new cosmetics, forcing Riot Games to temporarily disable the premium cosmetics until a fix was deployed one week later.
Inspired by gaming hardware, the RGX 11z bundle are the latest skins to join the vast collection in Valorant.
Including all-new features such as a kill counter, along with reactive gun buddies and color changes on the various weapons, the latest bundle is the first of its kind.
Though with the arrival of the bundle in Valorant patch 3.07 came some in-game performance issues, with the skins being labeled “pay to lose” as players experienced frame rate drops while using them.
New #VALORANT skin bundle: RGX 11z Pro, with a Katana melee!
This bundle is inspired by "high end gaming hardware."
🔺 Kill counter
🔺 Bullets holes match LED color
🔺 Color changes on inspect
🔺 Gun buddy reacts when you fire pic.twitter.com/gsmqWXnnpQ
— ValorIntel (@ValorINTEL) October 5, 2021
The bundle announcement was met with hype from the community, but the release was met with disappointed players. Immediately we saw reports of performance issues flooding in across social media, and a post on Valorant’s subreddit highlighting the problems climbed to the top.
More and more players began pouring in with their experiences, with even Valorant pro Shahzeb ‘ShahZaM’ Khan tweeting that he got 100 less FPS when using the new Vandal skin.
i get 100 less fps when i use the new vandal skin HUH
— ShahZaM (@ShahZaMk) October 6, 2021
A Riot dev shorlty followed up to the reports, revealing in a Reddit comment that there’s an ongoing investigation that will determine if a hotfix is required.
“We’re doing some investigation into the full severity of it and will determine if we hotfix this or push an update in the next patch. We’ll make sure we communicate what we decide to do.”
Hours later and the official Valorant Twitter account announced the highest tier variants would be blocked altogether.
Players were unable to purchase “Level 5 and variants for the gun in this skin set,” Riot explained on October 8.
As a stopgap, we're disabling purchases of Level 5 and variants for the guns in this skin set. You can still purchase all other levels and all the melee levels. A full fix is still in the works. Stay tuned. https://t.co/SrpEset3SO
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) October 8, 2021
Other variants were still accessible over the following days, though the problematic tier wasn’t fixed until October 12.
All tiers of the RGX 11Z Pro gun skins were finally re-enabled seven days after their troublesome introduction.
We've deployed a fix for the performance issues with the RGX 11Z Pro gun skins. You should now be able to purchase all levels and variants. Apologies for the hassle! https://t.co/paE5SIdezN
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) October 12, 2021
“You should now be able to purchase all levels and variants,” Riot confirmed.
We’ll be sure to keep you up to speed right here if any further issues continue after the October 12 fix.
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