The game isn’t even out yet, but of course there are always going to be bad actors that feel the need to alleviate their lack of competence and ability using the age-old system of cheating. Programmer and anti-cheat lead Paul Chamberlain of Riot Games took to Twitter moments ago to confirm that Riot have found the first Valorant cheater, and have successfully banned them.
Of course, now this means that the player won’t even be able to use the rare opportunity to play in the Valorant closed beta, and the odds of him getting in again on a new account aren’t necessarily in their favor, regardless of methods used.
It’s a bit wild that in the fourth day of a notoriously difficult closed-beta to get into, people are already cheating to gain an upper hand against others that are simply trying to figure out how the game works, much less play in some high-stake tournaments. We’ll be puzzling over what could possibly be gained by it for a while, although the answer is likely to be found somewhere near the ‘I need more Twitch viewers’ area.
Well it sucks, but today we had to ban our first cheater (and it looks like more bans are on the horizon).
I was hoping for a little more time before this fight kicked off but we're in it now and we're ready.
— Paul Chamberlain (@arkem) April 9, 2020
It’s also interesting to note that this has occurred prior to Asia joining into the fray, which hosts countries where cheating is rampant and socially acceptable such as China. Riot likely paused their deployment into that region precisely for that region to give the anti-cheat software that Riot uses a bit more time to analyze what ‘right’ looks like in terms of gameplay, throwing a warning when something breaks the general gameplay mold.
Regardless, it’s clear that Riot was well-prepared for bad actors to join into the fray and attempt to ruin the experience for everyone else on the server, and those bad actors were readily slapped down when they were noticed. It’s a move that frankly the industry as a whole should all be supporting, as those band actors can lead to a myriad of frustration and disappointing gameplay that everyone gets to suffer for, while one person feels as though they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.
If you’re curious how it feels to play against cheaters, feel free to boot up some modern Team Fortress 2 and join a public server, or Counter-Strike and use the built-in matchmaking rather than an external service.
The end of Pauls’ tweet seems a bit more interesting; it appears that more cheaters are slowly filtering into the competitive shooter as Riot grants access to more users. As long as Riot continues to publically maintain a stranglehold on cheaters and other bad actors, Valorant has a fantastic time in store for everyone.
