Right after Riot Games revealed their new game project Valorant to the masses, the company pledged to tackle online cheaters right form start. Riot’s anti-cheat system called Riot Vanguard received its fair share of criticism from a lot of members of the community since it asks admin-like level of access to your PC, and sometimes messes up some drivers. However, after yesterday, there’s no denying that Riot Vanguard works as it was intended.
According to Riot Games anti-cheat developer Phillip Koskinas, Riot Vanguard already helped to locate 8873 cheaters which were served a ban.
Having in mind the fact that Valorant is still in closed beta, these numbers are insane, and it’s only the first wave of cleaning. The company stated that competitive integrity is their priority, so Riot Games plans to continue their fight against cheaters even if it makes a portion of the community unhappy about their anti-cheat program.
We’d like to remind you that just a week ago Riot Games representative Paul “Arkem” Chamberlain wrote a lengthy blog post about Riot Vanguard and gave some more insights into the developer’s way of thinking. Here’s a short snippet:
“How do we think we can protect the game experience from cheats? It’s fundamentally a defense-in-depth approach. We first build the game to be as cheat-resistant as we can (e.g., Fog of War, and server authoritative movement netcode). Next, we make the cost of developing cheats as prohibitive as possible (e.g., Vanguard and other anti-tamper measures). Finally, we detect, ban, and remove cheaters from the game as efficiently as possible using Vanguard cheat detection, hardware bans, player reports, data analysis, and machine learning research.”
If you’re interested, it’s a fascinating read that will hopefully give you more insight into the thought process of the developers. We can only hope that Valorant developers will achieve success and Valorant’s competitive integrity will be unmatched.
