[News] Riot mocks Valorant hackers, says it will ban anyone who 'rides the cheat bus on the highway to hell'

[rlex]

 

 

Riot's latest blogpost about Valorant reveals some of the lengths the developer is going to in order to combat cheaters. Even before the game was released, catching cheaters has been one of Riot's major priorities—not unreasonably, given how widespread cheating can be in competitive shooters. 

Most remarkably, for the online First Strike tournament, Riot reviewed every single player account because "we needed to know who every player was [...] We had to make the precedents and rules almost as we went, deciding what exactly constitutes a disqualification, and how we’d handle those."

Matt 'K30' Paoletti is Riot's senior anti-cheat analyst, and reckons "we hit a decent mark, and have learned a ton for the next one."
However, the logistics of a big tournament are one thing, and day-to-day matchmaking is a whole other kettle of smelly fish. Paoletti goes into some detail on what Riot intends to do in targeting players who cheat in matchmaking, and an amusing aspect of this is the man's utter disdain for his targets.

The number of matches with a cheater is "a fraction of a percent", but Riot acknowledges that this is still too high, and that "cheaters at the highest ranks also put a stain on the prestige that comes with reaching such heights in a highly competitive game. We saw that some players also looked to bask in the ill-gotten gains of cheaters by teaming with them—knowing that the cheater would get banned after a few games, but they would get to reap the rewards."

This type of behaviour, which can involve playing with a hack-based cheater or just a smurf account, is known colloquially as 'bussing', and Riot is instituting a 90-day penalty for players who participate in such activity, as well as looking into how to recalibrate ranks for the innocent players affected by the behaviour. Paoletti subsequently clarified that this will be targetting boosting services in a precise manner, so shouldn't affect 'innocent' players, though of course the proof will be in the pudding.