Cheating In VALORANT Is Currently At An All-Time Low
Despite valid concerns about VALORANT’s anti-cheat system since its announcement, Riot Games has reported that Vanguard is effectively combating cheating, which as a result is at an all-time low.
What Is VALORANT’s Anti-Cheat?
While most multiplayer titles have constant cheating issues, such as Call of Duty: Warzone where it’s rampant. VALORANT has managed to make the problem almost negligible, thanks to its robust anti-chat system. The anti-cheat for Riot’s tactical hero FPS has received much criticism, due to it being located in the kernel of your OS - essentially the core of the system.
This has caused many concerns about data security and spying from Riot. A company owned by Chinese conglomerate Tencent, who are in close connection with the countries authoritarian government. Activision have also seemingly noticed the success of Vanguard, and are set to include a similar concept anti-cheat in the upcoming COD: Vanguard, that will also be added to Warzone.
What Has Riot Said About Its Anti-Cheat?
In the latest VALORANT blog post, released on October 18, Senior Anti-Cheat Analyst Matt Paoletti updated us on how the system has been working and their continued plans.
Firstly they provided more info on an implementation from their last anti-cheat update, which is a penalty for 'bussing'. This is when someone intentionally queues with a cheater to get boosted to higher ranks, which they’ve been punishing. They also provided an update on the integrity of the competitive mode, in which the number of reports are trending downwards, despite some regions seeing spikes which are continually investigated.
Paoletti goes on to describe the overall state of cheating in VALORANT today, calling it a 'continual arms race'. He also talks about the increasing popularity of hardware cheats and machine learning algorithms with cheat developers. Despite this, he claims the "team has been able to stay a few steps ahead in the battle,” banning cheats “across a wide variety of providers and methods of execution".
The blog post does go onto rather bluntly state that there are still and will always be cheaters in the game, but they are working hard to make sure it’s never viable, using the latest operational advancements in cybersecurity to stay ahead of the cheat makers.
It looks like Vanguard has been a success for Riot Games and has allowed them to win the arms race with cheaters and even pesky smurfs so far. With Episode 3, Act 3 on the way, and a brand-new agent coming soon, it’s good that cheaters are having a hard time ruining players fun.
