Whether we're talking about wallhack, aimbot, aimlock or other even more sophisticated terms, we're always talking about someone who cheats. These cheating techniques — which are obviously forbidden in all competitive games — continue to be used. For Valorant, the community hopes for a cheat-free, balanced and fluid game. Paul "Riot Arkem" Chamberlain — programmer and anti-cheat lead at Riot Games — answered many questions about the anti-cheat system in the game on Reddit.
Overview
- Valorant's anti-cheat system will be called Vanguard.
- They're also working on an anti-cheat system based on data collected in game to track aim-bots.
- Vanguard is similar in many ways to Battleye or Easy Anticheat but — since it has been developed for Valorant — will be more suitable and easy to update if necessary.
- RiotArkem says they're proud of the work they have done so far with Vanguard.
Questions
Riot Arkem:
There are a bunch of different features that we're examining when it comes to mouse inputs for aimbot detection, acceleration and impulse are two of them and we can use those features to try and model aimbot behavior.
I guess theoretically there could be an aimbot that is indistinguishable from a human but at that point it's basically account sharing between you and your aimbot :)
Riot Arkem:
We've been doing a lot of compatibility testing to try and decrease the chance of Vanguard conflicting with anti-virus software, other anti-cheat software or unusual computer configurations.
We don't want any conflicts or false positives and will be working hard to fix any that appear.
Did you test the anti-cheat out? Like did you, or someone else, download a cheating software and play the Dev version of VALORANT to see if it worked?
Riot Arkem:
There are many ways that we can detect cheating, some of the ways involve detecting a specific cheat directly (e.g. "is this computer running cheat.exe"), other methods involve detecting the technical action of the cheat (e.g. "unknownprogram.exe is trying to modify the game, wtf!"), and yet more methods rely on analyzing player behaviors (e.g. "why does x_nooblord_x_420 keep getting running wallbang headshots?" or "why does gangawarrior69's mouse move like a robot?").
In addition we can find cheats through manual investigations, these investigations can start due to suspcious game stats (e.g. "why is this person 100% accurate" or "why is this person's winrate 95%"), due to reports (e.g. "literally everyone is reporting this person for cheating") or due to out of game research or tips (e.g. "what's up with this BuyVALORANThacks.com.au website?").
During development I built an aimbot and a wallhack to test some of our security systems and so did some of my colleagues (and some consultants we hired). We also tested against some generic cheats that can work on multiple games. The feedback from these exercises have been useful in refining our security.
Riot Arkem:
How quickly a player is detected will depend on the specific method we're using to find the cheat.
Something like a hard detection for a known cheat is very quick and we can have a very high confidence of the result so we can eject the player and cancel the match (you can see an example of this with the "Match Terminated" screen in the original trailer).
For a behavioral detection or a manual investigation it can take longer before we're confident enough to apply the penalty. In those cases the player might be between matches or in a different match when the penalty is applied.
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.
Riot Arkem:
In general we won't ban you for running cheats for other games. The caveat here is that some tools are useful for cheating at multiple games (CheatEngine is one example).
If you use CheatEngine to cheat at Binding of Isaac or whatever (I've heard of people using it as a regular debugger for programming too) we don't mind but please don't have it running while you're trying to play VALORANT or we will assume that you want to cheat in this game too.
Riot Arkem:
One of the reasons that we're going to be giving out temporary hardware ID bans in is to limit the collateral damage that banning shared PCs would have.
Our strategy is that hardware bans don't adhere to accounts. So if you try to play from a banned machine your account doesn't get automatically banned, you just can't play from it (if this happens to your account a lot we'd probably investigate it though). This means that if a PC Bang computer is hardware banned that it's bad for the operator of the PC Bang and annoying for the player trying to play but no lasting damage is done.
That said, we will strongly encourage PC Bang operators to monitor their PCs for cheats and are willing to take action against organizations that are profiting off cheating.
Valorant release is slowly getting closer, but the community continues to be really active. Today we're looking at chobysan's creations who is making portraits of all the agents of Riot Games' FPS.
