Cheaters are the scourge of every online game, but Riot has some ideas on how to get rid of them in Valorant.
Valorant's community (like any community) has some representatives it is not proud of. These include toxic players, smurfs, and cheaters. However, Riot has been taking steps to fix the gameplay experience, and it's time to get rid of cheaters with a significant update to Vanguard Anti Cheat. We wrote about all the problems with cheaters last year, and we're thrilled to say that some of these issues have been addressed by now! Yesterday, we got a pretty extensive blog post from Matt "K3o" Paoletti of Riot Games, so let's see what this next Anti Cheat update could bring to the game.
State of Cheating In Valorant
Matt “K3o” Paoletti from Riot Games claims that Valorant currently has the lowest percentage of cheaters since the game came out. This is due to the many Vanguard Anti Cheat updates and solutions, like the 90-day ban for queuing with a cheater (aka bussing). However, cheaters will always find a way, and this time Riot noticed a problem with hardware cheats. These cheats are pretty expensive, but they are almost impossible to detect, and you can use them absolutely anywhere. This could be a threat to fair play in eSports tournaments where the player has the right to demand the use of their hardware, so Riot must focus on this in the coming time.
There’s been an increased popularity in hardware cheats. These are cheats that depend on an external piece of hardware to run functionally, intended to try to bypass both protections and detections implemented by the team. Cheat developers have also instituted other novel ideas, such as machine learning algorithms.
How Will Riot Deal With Cheaters In Valorant?
For now, Riot Games hasn't provided us with any specific solutions for cheaters, and that makes sense. Moreover, they will probably never give exact details on their plans as it could help cheaters prepare in some way, and that's not the point, as they genuinely want to get rid of them for good.
We'll continue to iterate on the best version of Vanguard (Valorant Anti Cheat) with an emphasis on keeping cheaters out of the ecosystem for good. This includes us benefiting from the newest advancements in cybersecurity as a whole, most noticeably, utilizing security upgrades in operating systems that enable us to better identify and prevent cheaters.
However, we can expect significant changes to the game and the Vanguard Anti Cheat system at the start of the new Valorant Episode, i.e., after the World Championships, sometime early next year. As mentioned above, the percentage of cheaters is the lowest it's ever been, so it's not as much of a priority for the developers as it was at the beginning of Episode 2, but it's still essential to keep the gameplay as fair as possible.
Third party tools is our main focus, but we have spent time in other forms of game integrity violation like boosting through account sharing and wintrading, and we will continue to explore where we can create the most impact in maintaining VALORANT as the most competitive tactical shooter in the world
We're thrilled to see that even though the cheater problem is less than in similar games (like Overwatch or CS:GO), the developers continue to take our gameplay experience to the next level.
Do you have any experience with cheaters in Valorant? Join our Discord and chat with us about it! You should also consider joining MyEarlyGame to customize the content on our website and enter exclusive giveaways or tournaments!