Riot has hit cheaters with a massive ban wave once again. Valorant’s anti-cheat software, “Vanguard,” has been hailed as the best anti-cheating software the industry has seen. Cheating still plagues many other games like Counter-Strike and Warzone to this date. Cheat developers always manage a way to crack into the game’s mechanics and completely alter it to go in favor of cheaters.
Vanguard Bans Multiple Cheating Valorant Accounts Before the Season Launch Day.
March is a crucial month for Valorant with the release of Season 8 Act 2. The build-up to this act was the introduction of VCT qualifiers, which took competitive Valorant to its peak. Amidst the increasing competition, Riot wants to ensure fair gameplay, and they’ve once again managed to ban multiple cheating accounts that were making the rounds.
While other developers have been struggling to crack down on DMA cheat sellers, Riot was quick to ban all DMA-related cheats recently. This was confirmed when screenshots of cheat sellers shutting down were posted on multiple Reddit threads.
valorant has done a massive ban wave on DMA, hitting most providers @AntiCheatPD
byu/SandwichKnown9050 inVALORANT
Direct Access Memory cheats basically use another PC to trick the server and grant players cheats. These types of cheats do not run any cheating software on the main PC. Instead, they mimic a completely unique input, and the main server would have access to software being run by this DMA input device. To this day, Activision has struggled to catch cheating DMA devices, and it’s been plaguing the game hard for years now.
Valorant’s A Short History with Cheating
During the launch of Valorant, cheaters were very common in almost every Elo. Hilarious clips of cheaters glitching all over the map surfaced almost every alternate game. It did not take much time for Vanguard to learn about these cheats and detect them. Cheat developers got on their grind from beta testing, and ads/promos could be found all over the internet for cheats. The cheat developers used to livestream their cheats not being caught while promoting their store link.
The issue of cheater sellers streaming cheats still exists in games like Counter-Strike. Valorant, at the same time, was quick to crackdown on the multiple ways to cheat the server. From DMA cheats to traditional aim bots, Riot has been proud to share its data regarding cheat bans. Irrespective of the strong anti-cheat measures, Riot had to face the heat when a team was caught cheating during a VCT qualification event.
The DSG – Noot Noot Cheating Incident
Despite its strong anti-cheat software, the end of 2023 was unfortunate for Disguised Toast’s women’s Valorant team. They were knocked out of the tournament by Noot Noot after a hard-fought match. Later, it turned out that a player in Noot Noot was cheating, and the whole team was disqualified from the tournament. Clips later surfaced showing aimbot mechanics being used by Noot Noot in multiple matches, including the DSG match. DSG was heavily invested in Valorant with a women’s roster for the Game Changers tournaments as well. This incident hit them hard financially, and the team decided to completely walk away from Valorant in December 2023.
The timing of the recent wave couldn’t be any more perfect with the Master Madrid coming in soon. Riot wants to make sure no cheaters make it to professional games, and the steps taken so far look positive.
