ANTI-CHEAT UPDATE // WINTER 2023

Hello, it’s Matt “K3o” Paoletti on behalf of the VALORANT Anti-Cheat team, here to give the latest update on VALORANT's efforts to keep cheaters out of your games.

As always our team is dedicated to maintaining competitive integrity, across both the Competitive queue and esports. This also includes winning the so-called “arms race” of cheat versus anti-cheat, which we’ll cover below.

SUMMARY:

• Bans have been stable, with most being preventative.
• Cheat developers have been using Social Media as an advertising tool to try to get new customers.
• The team has been addressing new methods of cheating, building proprietary technology through Vanguard to mitigate the effectiveness of these cheats.
• We’re rolling out VAN:RESTRICTION to give an extra layer of security to players that meet a variety of risk factors.

Bans

Despite increasingly sophisticated attempts by cheaters to bypass Vanguard, our overall ban numbers have remained stable. The chart below shows VALORANT player ID bans by type: hardware, manual, and when caught by our automated system detection.

Repeat offenders, those using multiple accounts to cheat on the same machine, remain the majority of bans. We’re continually working on ways to keep these cheaters permanently out of our ecosystem.

Social Media and Cheating

You may have come across content on social media, advertising or live-streaming “undetectable cheats” for VALORANT, boasting their ability to remain undetected despite egregious cheating behavior. With Vanguard, it seems like such obvious behavior should be detected, so why is it being actively streamed with seemingly no consequences?

The reality is that the overwhelming majority of “livestreams” are pre-recorded content. Cheat developers are counting on views and misleading people on social media, to advertise their product. While these cheats are banned swiftly, it’s enough gameplay time to record footage and recycle it as an advertising loop. Unsuspecting customers will take these videos at face value, buy the cheat, feel savvy for a moment, and then swiftly banned. The cheat developers get their sale regardless - oh - and no refunds.

Fighting the Arms Race

Due to Vanguard’s strong prevention layers, cheaters have been using novel models to attempt to circumvent us. One of the more advanced methods we’ve seen in VALORANT’s cheating communities is Direct Memory Access cheats, where cheaters use hardware devices to try to work outside of Vanguard.

Below is an example of what that attempt looks like:

We have developed and deployed what we consider to be best-in-class technology to prevent these devices from being able to be effective in VALORANT.

These kinds of cheating methods are attempted disproportionately by those who play at our highest levels of competition, and we are taking extra steps to ensure our newest security features are being enforced where it matters most.

Security Enforcement Protocols

Anti-Cheat is rolling out our VAN:RESTRICTION system, where we will be requiring additional security requirements for players that we’ve identified as meeting various factors of risk.

By using common security features on devices, we can prevent many of the ways cheaters look to get around our protections to negatively affect games. Various behavioral detection systems will identify suspicious behavior, and players will be alerted of the device changes needed to ensure competitive integrity.

These infractions are not punishments, and we look to get affected players compliant with our standards. More information can be found here. Should you still encounter difficulties, please write into Player Support.