Everything you need to know about the VALORANT's anti-cheat

Cheaters are without a doubt one of the biggest nightmares in competitive gaming. Imagine a situation when you are enjoying such a wonderful session of your favorite game just to get destroyed in no time by a suspicious player with a strange-sounding name, weird movement, and super clear shots. Aimbot? Wallhack? I’m pretty sure that each of you has met such an opponent at least once in your gaming journey. If you are pretty tired of the people who are ruining your competitive experience because of the constant cheats we have good news - none of these will happen to you during your VALORANT matches, or at least, that’s the goal.

In order to provide the best gaming experience possible, Riot Games with Paul “Arkem“ Chamberlain as a lead, have designed their very own anti-cheat system dedicated to VALORANT.

Vanguard Anti-Cheat (VAC) will deliver a few completely new things to competitive first-person shooters. Paul Chamberlain has recently spoken with techtudo.com and explained some of the processes behind the creation of the anti-cheat software.

“We created a game that can resist the most common types of cheating in shooters. This was possible thanks to our early discussions about security against the cheaters in the early stages of development, technically before the pre-production of the game”, comments Chamberlain.

The lead of Vanguard has explained further that when it comes to the creation and development of both the software and the game there will be three key approaches: “The first step is to make the game as resistant to cheating as possible, then to make cheats difficult and expensive to develop, and finally, to have a flexible investigation and quick action system to detect and ban the people.”

Some of the technologies will be imported from the other Riot Game’s title, League of Legends. But being aware of how destructive the cheats can be in the competitive shooters, the developers have decided to improve the system that was already invented by them in the past.

Vanguard will be an AI-based system that will monitor the servers and the players in real-time and will automatically take an action when needed, for example, to ban a troublesome individual. Chamberlain also explained that the cheats being the most commonly used in the FPS games such as aimbots and wallhacks, have already been studied and are on the radar of Vanguard. Thus, a user that always lands a headshot or that can "predict" what happens outside of their field of vision, will be a potential suspect.

"We have researchers behind Vanguard that analyze the communities of the cheaters and keep an eye on what they are talking about or what new products are being in development". Riot Game’s goal is to be always one step ahead of the cheaters and the hacks’ makers.

The development will progress further once the beta version of the game will be launched, and of course after the official release in the summer this year. It will be crucial for the team to monitor the players’ behavior and notice all of the suspicious actions happening on the server.

What will happen to the people who will be proven guilty? It’s not fully defined yet but the hardware bans are put into consideration. “This might always change in the future, but my current idea is to suspend permanently all of the accounts that we will find guilty for using the cheats. In addition, we would like to temporarily prohibit their computer from running the game in order to discourage the user from creating a new account on the same device”.

Hardware bans will be for sure used in the most extreme situations, and won’t be addressed in other cases such as account selling, smurfing, griefing and so on. Being reported for toxicity will result in an individual case checking following with a variety of punishments like chat restrictions and account suspension if the case will repeat regularly.

“A game agnostic anti-cheat platform is an anti-cheat platform that could be applied to multiple games. Things like Battleye and Easy Anticheat are game agnostic anti-cheat platforms. Vanguard is similar in many ways to Battleye and Easy Anticheat but since it's built in-house at Riot and is for Riot's games we have some advantages. For example, we can more closely integrate Vanguard into our games, move quicker when it comes to updating Vanguard or VALORANT's security and make security tradeoffs that might be unappealing to other developers or publishers”, we can read in one of Reddit comments made by Chamberlain.

“All of this work is a step towards the goal of gaining the players' trust”, says Paul Chamberlain. And it’s hard to disagree that so far the Riot Game’s team is doing everything the gamers were asking for years. With this set of mind and a clear direction, it’s giving us hope that we might finally see one of the most cheaters-free game made in years. Will it be like this? Only time will tell.