Cheaters Never Win
As the esports industry has continued to explode in popularity over the past few years, so too has the number of people willing to cheat to get ahead in online games. Call Of Duty: Vanguard saw hackers dominating matches as early as its first 48 hours, and exploits for Battlefield 2042 started going on sale even before the game’s release. However, despite the best efforts of cheaters, some companies are managing to stay ahead – including Riot, with their competitive 5v5 FPS Valorant.
Although Valorant’s anti-cheat system is fairly intrusive, starting to run from the second you turn on your PC, even if you don’t have Valorant open,along with Riot’s bounty for anti-cheat exploits it’s been incredibly efficient at catching cheaters so far. However, Riot aren’t resting on their laurels – just as cheaters are constantly testing new methods, so too must Riot continually upgrade the anti-cheat engine. To keep the community up to date on how the battle against cheaters is going, the dev team have posted a report on Valorant Episode 3’s anti-cheat system.
In the update post on the Valorant website, senior anti-cheat analyst Matt “K3O” Paoletti outlined how the team have been handling the arms race of keeping ahead of cheats: “Our team has been able to stay a few steps ahead in the battle and routinely ban cheats across a wide variety of providers and methods of execution. Despite what developers may say, the words “artificial intelligence” do not make a cheat undetectable. Not only that, we’re tackling unique forms of cheating outside of the typical aimbots, such as cheats that look to tamper with the game engine and assets.”
So far, Valorant have been doing well with keeping one step ahead of the cheaters – right now, cheating reports are at an all-time low. However, the struggle never stops, and the team are dedicated to keeping the fight going into Valorant’s future: “What are we doing next? Little surprise here, but we’ll continue to iterate on the best version of Vanguard with an emphasis on keeping cheaters out of the ecosystem for good. This includes us benefiting from the newest advancements in cybersecurity as a whole, most noticeably, utilizing security upgrades in operating systems that enable us to better identify and prevent cheaters.”