Valorant emoji support appears accidental, Riot confirms rollback via hotfix

Valorant players have been having a blast sending emojis in chat. Turns out, Riot never meant for that to happen.

Stephen Kraman, a Game Product Manager at Riot Games who goes by @RiotSkram on X, posted this morning confirming a fix is already rolling out. For now, messages containing emojis won’t be delivered to other players, though the sender will still see them on their own screen.

A follow-up hotfix drops tomorrow, and that’s when emoji support in Valorant chat gets removed entirely. Kraman also reminded players to back up recent replays before the hotfix goes live, since replay files typically don’t survive game patches.

The feature was never officially added. Players figured it out on their own, largely by using the Windows emoji picker shortcut (Windows + .), which apparently just worked inside Valorant’s chat.

A thread in r/VALORANT from about 22 hours ago had players puzzled and excited in equal measure, with the OP simply asking how people were sending emojis after the latest update. One commenter confirmed the Windows shortcut, and another had already found shortcodes like “emoji:clove:4LeafClover” to pull agent-themed emojis directly into chat.

Someone even uploaded a quick video on YouTube showing off how to use emojis:

The responses under Kraman’s post indicate that players aren’t happy with the decision to remove the emojis from chat. One player called it “the best feature introduced in years.” Several others pushed for a middle-ground fix, asking Riot to block letter emojis that can be strung together to form slurs while keeping the face ones intact.

Riot hasn’t explained what caused emoji support to slip through in the first place. Kraman’s post is currently the only official word from the company. Whether it was a chat system update that left a gap for OS-level emoji input or something else entirely isn’t clear yet.

For now, if you send an emoji in Valorant, you’ll see it. Nobody else will. The hotfix tomorrow takes care of that completely.

And back up those replays.

Featured image edited with AI

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