Valorant: Riot to roll out the auto-ban feature during the official launch

Pic courtesy: TalkEsports
Pic courtesy: TalkEsports

With Valorant’s official release looming around the corner (June 2nd), Riot Games has decided to make some drastic changes to the Valorant anti-cheat software- Vanguard.

Vanguard has been the source of many controversies since the time of the closed beta launch. It has mercilessly banned close to 9,000 accounts, with just 1,600 coming in one single wave earlier this week. Even the CS: GO pro Mixwell was flagged by Vanguard as a cheater, just because he had plugged his phone into the computer while playing Valorant.

However, it’s important to note here that while issuing all of these bans, the Riot developers were not using Vanguard's auto-banning systems. They were doing all the bans manually, as they were tracking cheaters by identifying inputs and banning players based on Vanguard’s feedback.

But during the official release, things will be very different, and the developers want to be more aggressive with their approach to cheaters. They will roll in Vanguard's auto banning feature.


Valorant's anti-cheat Vanguard to have auto-ban enabled

Vanguard recently banned 1,600 accounts
Vanguard recently banned 1,600 accounts

In a recent dev post, Riot stated:

“With VALORANT being the grand unveiling of Vanguard, we’ve gotten a lot of inputs that help us understand what cheats—and forms of cheating—we can effectively deter with the platform. But during closed beta, we’ve held off on deploying the second half of our tech, our auto-banning systems.”

To the Valorant devs, maintaining the competitive integrity of the game is incredibly important. They said:

“As with any game, our guarantee isn’t that VALORANT will be cheat free, it’s that our commitment to anti-cheat doesn’t end when you forget about it.”

If all goes right, it seems like Valorant is sure to have a very bright future in eSports. They are trying to solve a problem that has been plaguing shooters like Overwatch and CS: GO for a very long time. And they seem to be taking a much firmer stand.

Edited by Sai Krishna