Riot’s shooter is a hot topic these days, ever since the game entered its closed beta. Valorant devs claimed that cheating will be hard to execute in the title, but hackers managed to find a way.
Valorant is supposed to be the latest entry into the esports scene when it comes to shooters. The genre is already occupied by big names like CS:GO, Overwatch and Call of Duty so making a breakthrough won’t be easy. Riot’s shooter had some nice selling points though, it marketed polished gunplay, tactical abilities for each agent, 128 tick servers, low latency, and no cheaters. Over the last few days in the beta, we’ve had the chance to observe each of the points.
Gunplay in Valorant is solid, weapons feel very similar and behave much like in CS:GO with some of them even having the same spray/recoil patterns. This makes it easy for experienced CS players to make a switch to Valorant, so it’s no coincidence. Servers were overloaded by the number of people joining in on the beta as Riot were clearly not prepared.
Day 1 of Closed Beta has been incredible but humbling as we scale our servers. For now, we have to pause stream drops until tomorrow morning (PT). We'll let you know as soon as they're back. We hear your questions and concerns about CB access and will clarify as soon as we can.
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) April 8, 2020
While most of the agents have mainly tactical skills to operate with, some posses instant nukes able to take out an enemy or even an entire team. Raze is especially frowned upon by most players as she has both mobility, high damage grenades and a rocket launcher. She’s the living example that you can in fact kill players with your abilities. Gunplay was supposed to be the focus right?
No Cheaters
No doubt the second best thing after gameplay was the promise that hackers won’t stand a chance. Riot will have to prove themselves just mere days after the start of the closed beta.
Well it didn't take long, this guys just walking around full on aimlocking dropping big bombs @Slasher pic.twitter.com/QhbA9CrVG9
— phantasy (@phantasyftw) April 9, 2020
Well it sucks, but today we had to ban our first cheater (and it looks like more bans are on the horizon).I was hoping for a little more time before this fight kicked off but we're in it now and we're ready.
— Paul Chamberlain (@arkem) April 9, 2020
To put it out of the way, Riot never claimed that there won’t be any cheaters. The company mentioned they’re fully prepared to deal with them as the game is built quite differently from CS:GO for example. Data from the server about your enemy’s location is always coming in the latter, while in Valorant those values are hidden until absolutely necessary. In theory, this will make cheats much harder to use, but not impossible. Riot promised to end ranked games prematurely when a hacker is detected. The company will also apply hardware bans, making it much harder for a cheater to come back into the game with a freshly made account.
Valorant’s anti-cheat lead Paul Chamberlain also left a post on Reddit with some more info on the situation.
To follow up on a lot of the comments I'm seeing (sorry there're too many people to respond to individually right now)
Yeah it's disappointing that the first cheats appeared so quickly. Ruined my day.
Cheaters gonna cheat but we're in this fight for the long haul so even if cheaters find a hole we'll be around to plug it.
No magic bullets to stop hacks but we're doing a bunch of things to keep them out of your games. If you hear of one (a magic bullet) let me know, I'm listening :)
Fog of War is working! Enemies that are not in line of sight or just around a corner from the player don't have up to date positions. Your hack can draw them on the screen anyway but you're just showing obsolete info. More info about Fog of War coming out next week hopefully.
You are all the best judges of how we're doing, so let me (us) know if you're not happy with the state of the game so we know that we have to improve.
Will Valorant be plagued by hackers in the closed beta, will Riot resolve the issue or will there be dire consequences? You’ll find out in the next Valorant update. In any case, the fight has already begun and only time will tell us the outcome.
