In Riot Games’ latest move against the emergent problem of cheating in the Valorant beta, the studio has announced that their latest wave of bans has removed 8,873 cheaters from the game. Riot also took the opportunity to reinforce their firm anti-cheat position on social media, in order to ensure; “the highest standard of competitive integrity” in their upcoming shooter.
Riot Bans 8,873 Valorant Cheaters
Riot’s anti-cheat engineer Phillip Koskinas told followers on social media yesterday about the ban-wave, along with the 8,873 figure. The official Riot Vanguard account echoed his message shortly thereafter, stating; “Even though this is just closed beta, we’ve promised that we’re going to be heavily committed to anti-cheat. This banwave is still only the beginning. We’re going to ensure the highest standard of competitive integrity in VALORANT.”
This ban-wave is Riot’s largest single strike against cheaters thus far. Despite being a closed beta, and despite the game’s supposedly robust anti-cheat Vanguard system, cheating has quickly become a problem for Valorant. Fortunately, as we speculated might be coming last week, Riot has now launched their first big crackdown on Valorant cheaters. Anti-cheat lead Paul Chamberlain had previously stated that; “sometimes it’s better for us to delay so that cheat developers don’t learn that they’re detected for a while;” prompting speculation that a ban-wave might be on the horizon.
Hopefully, Riot’s indication that this wave of bans is; “still only the beginning,” holds true over the coming months. After all, if Valorant is to succeed as an esports title, the game’s competitive scene will need to be as secure as possible from cheating. Although not all are happy about the potential invasiveness of the Vanguard anti-cheat system, Riot seems to believe that such a system is necessary to prevent wide-scale cheating; a problem which plagues almost all major competitive titles in some way or another. Of course, it remains difficult to predict how successful their efforts will be in the long run.