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Even with a sophisticated anti-cheat software like Vanguard, Valorant is not exactly free of cheaters.
It is a problem that has been affecting every online competitive shooter that is out there, and Riot Games’ tactical fps is no stranger to this fact.
With that being said, Valorant’s Vanguard has done a better job than most of the anti-cheat systems that are out there. As it’s a kernel-level software, its very intrusiveness is what makes it so successful in today’s esports market.
However, the anti-cheat’s auto-detection is not the only thing that dictates the success of a game's anti-cheat measures. Along with auto-banning, both manual-banning and player reports go a long way in helping a game like Valorant maintain its competitive integrity.
In a recent blog post, Riot Games’ anti-cheat lead Paul “Arkem” Chamberlain explained just how important community participation is to help Riot Games develop a more robust version of Vanguard. ‘Player reporting’ is one of the most important aspects of combatting the hacker pandemic, and the Valorant devs want the player base to report more.
97% of the player base goes unreported in Valorant
In the Valorant blog post, Arkem goes into a lot of detail as to why the devs think it is necessary for players to report suspicious activity. By "suspicious", we mean behaviour that is out of the norm and not a rage report just because you’re salty about a particular player who kept killing you over and over again.
Akerman said:
“Reports feed into many of our team’s processes both automated and manual. On the automated side, the Vanguard backend uses reports to decide whether or not a player should receive additional scrutiny, such as a higher intensity game integrity scan. Vanguard also uses the number of reports (more specifically the number of unique reporters and number of games in which the player was reported) as an indication of confidence in its findings—which helps us ban players faster and, in many cases, without manual review.”
However, the devs even look into player reports to keep up the manual review process and usually start looking into players who have a large number of reports against them. This process of player reporting and manual banning is important as, like any other anti-cheat software, Vanguard can be easily bypassed.
So if you’re not reporting suspicious activity, whose cheats Vanguard is not detecting, then you’re giving the hacker a free pass to do whatever they like in the Valorant servers.
Towards the end of the blog post, Arkem provided a rather scary statistic where he revealed:
“97% of players have never even received a single report—no one has ever found their behaviour suspicious enough to comment on. Of these 3% of players that have been reported for cheating, more than 80% of them have only ever been reported by a single player. 90% have been reported by fewer than 3 players. To put this another way, only 0.6% of players have received more than 1 cheating report and only 0.3% have received 3 or more. However, reports and cheaters aren’t perfectly correlated, many reported players are innocent and not all cheaters get reported before they’re banned. Right now only 53% of banned cheaters were reported before their ban and only 60% of players with 20 reports get banned after review.”
The statistics show that there is an enormous amount of potential hackers that the Valorant devs are not looking into as they’re either bypassing Vanguard or you, as the player, are not reporting them.
Riot wants players to report more to help Vanguard
Arkem has recently revealed that he will be leaving Riot Games soon, and that will leave the Valorant Anti-Cheat Lead position vacant. His role in developing Vanguard and making Valorant as competitively fair as possible has been integral, and he will be leaving behind a big pair of shoes to fill.
He ended his statement in the blog post by saying:
“So why am I telling you this? I want you all to report more, whenever you see something suspicious in your game please use the report system so we can see it too. Your reports are invaluable to us, your view from the ground is the best intelligence we could ask for and when we work together great things are possible!”
It’s only when the players start helping the developers will Valorant be able to have a fairer competitive environment. And more reporting, as Arkem says, will help measure “the health of the game as well as the effectiveness of Vanguard".
He added:
"If the overall number of reports is going up then that’s a sign to us as developers that players are feeling bad about the integrity of the game (regardless of the accuracy of each individual report)."
