Valorant is currently one of the hottest multiplayer games around, even as players are desperate to get access to the beta. And just as Riot has begun to ban those spending ridiculous money to get Valorant beta keys, the studio has also started an important first step in the life of any online game: banning cheaters.
“Well it sucks, but today we had to ban our first cheater (and it looks like more bans are on the horizon),” programmer and anti-cheat lead Paul Chamberlain says on Twitter. “I was hoping for a little more time before this fight kicked off but we’re in it now and we’re ready.”
Chamberlain has been surprisingly open about how Valorant’s anti-cheat works, as he says many of the systems aren’t any more likely to be exploited if cheaters know how they work. The game’s Fog of War system, for example, doesn’t send information about player locations to client machines unless they’re actually on-screen, so wallhacks will only display outdated positions.
But that’s just a cheat prevention thing – not an active anti-cheat measure that’s actively getting players banned. Riot is also using an AI to detect aimbots, but given the potential false positives, that’s just an investigation tool, not something that’s directly assigning bans – not yet, anyway.
Well it sucks, but today we had to ban our first cheater (and it looks like more bans are on the horizon).
I was hoping for a little more time before this fight kicked off but we're in it now and we're ready.
— Paul Chamberlain (@arkem) April 9, 2020
If you still haven’t gotten your Valorant beta key yet, there are plenty of other FPS games for you to dig into in the meantime.