What, why, and how of VALORANT anti-cheat

The latest blog post from Riot Games targeting Vanguard and cheating was published by Paul "Arkem" Chamberlain again, explaining once more the philosophy Riot Games used in their newest FPS game, VALORANT. For this he divided his approach into three parts: What, Why, and How.

In the "Why" Chamberlian explains why they put so much effort into fighting the cheaters. Hackers generate an uneven experience for the players and this destroys the competitive integrity of the game. The feeling of not being at an unfair disadvantage is one of the essential elements on which VALORANT was founded.

The answer to the "What" is something all players expect: to find as few cheaters as possible. They know they can't stop the cheaters immediately, but they aim to make meeting such individuals at least an uncommon event for players.

“How” does VALORANT intend to protect the gaming experience from the cheaters? Having defined the "What" the way the team of VALORANT approach to come to this is with measures since the creation of the game; one example of this is Fog of War and server authoritative movement netcode (to prevent speed hackers). In addition to Vanguard, it operates in such a way that any cheats that appear are banned as soon as possible. And to make the ban as effective as possible by using hardware bans (avoiding that a new account can be used to avoid the ban). Additional measures to keep cheaters at bay are player reports, data analysis, and machine learning research.

Although there are still cheaters running around as we speak, the long-term goal of the anti-cheat team is to make the development of cheaters as complicated, and therefore expensive, as possible. This way Riot Games aim to have fewer cheat developers and to be able to take legal action on those responsible for creating cheats.

There is still a long way to go, but VALORANT's anti-cheat team is committed to making the game experience as good as possible and highly communicative. If you want to learn more about this issue, make sure to visit the official VALORANT website.