VALORANT Anti-Cheat Explained: How It Can Take Over CS:GO.

[Cover Image Courtesy: Riot Games]

Ever since Riot Games announced their upcoming competitive shooter back in October 2019, fans were hyped about what the company behind League of Legends had to offer in the FPS genre. With the release of the first gameplay footage of the first person shooter in March, the game started posing a threat to the other giants in the industry like CS:GO and Rainbow Six Siege.

Riot has promised to focus on the Anti-Cheat of the upcoming game since day one, and it seems like they're sticking to their words as Paul "Riot Arkem" Chamberlain, a programmer and anti-cheat lead at Riot Games answered several questions sent in by Redditors in a Reddit thread.

Valorant's Anti-Cheat will be called Vanguard.

Although Vanguard was made primarily for Valorant, the anti-cheat can be used on other games as well. Chamberlain claims that the anti-cheat will make producing cheats less effective and costly. It will also be more flexible and easy to update by the devs, giving them more control over cheaters and faster responses to new cheats.

He also mentioned that the anti-cheat will not only be able to catch outright cheats running in machines, but also programs that attempt to modify the behavior of the game files. The AI in the Vanguard will also be able to catch robotic mouse movements and blatant aimbots.

When asked about how the hardware banning system of the game works Riot Arkem answered, "Hardware identification systems work by having a program on the computer (for example the game or launcher) examine a collection of features (like serial numbers) and combining them into a unique identifier. Depending on the system either these features, or (if generated locally) the unique identifier will be included with messages to the game server (often a login request or a join match request) and the server can decide whether or not to allow the player in based on the hardware information provided."

The thread also covered several other key factors such as ban durations, behavioral and manual detections of cheats and details on how the system worked.

It is evident from the dev's responses that Riot's anti-cheat will be one of the best anti-cheats in the video game industry, if not the best. Chamberlain also mentioned that he was pretty proud of their work on the anti-cheat. While other games like CS:GO struggle to keep their cheaters in check, this advanced anti-cheat might just give Valorant the edge they needed over the legendary competitive shooter by Valve.