All games need to follow Riot’s new solution to cheating crisis in Valorant

Riot is implementing a system to give you back your elo and stop cheaters from ruining your Valorant ranked matches. All other competitive games should do the same.

If you’re a regular ranked player in any competitive game, you know this scenario very well. You enter a comp match and suddenly a teammate says an enemy in the lobby is cheating. The worst part is they’re tearing your team apart, and there’s nothing you can do but take the L.

You report them and a day later you get a notification that they’ve been banned. But that message won’t bring back your lost elo and no matter how much you tried you were fated to lose. All you’re left with is a salty taste in your mouth.

In a surprise move, Riot announced in a dev update that they are working on a new anti-cheat system called Ranked Rollbacks to combat this. Essentially, if a cheater is detected in your game post-match, they will refund your lost RR

To put it simply, this is revolutionary.

Depending on your game of choice, the only solution teams could do to avoid losing elo against a hacker was to draw a match. This is common in Valorant or even other round-based games such as Overwatch 2 or Counter-Strike 2.

However, there are a few problems with this. For one, not every game can draw. For example in Overwatch 2, you can only draw select game modes, but other modes such as Clash or Flashpoint will only end when a winner is determined.

Other competitive titles such as League of Legends or Apex Legends will only end when a team comes out on top.

Secondly, and this is the hardest part of attempting to draw, is that all other players except the hacker need to agree to it. If a cheater is duo-ed with another player, they’ll most definitely not want to draw.

This is why the only times you’ll ever see this is in high-elo lobbies. As in high-ranked matches, everybody knows everybody and no one wants to be known as a player who is soft on cheaters.

Overall, the drawing method is time-consuming, not sustainable, and frankly tilt-inducing. Which is why Ranked Rollback is so important.

No matter how good a game’s anti-cheat is, they cannot always catch a hacker in time before they’ve done damage to matches and lobbies. That message of a reported player being banned is just a consolation.

There’s nothing better than having the knowledge that no matter how bad of a hacker you’ve queued into, they won’t ruin your elo. Of course, the system as described isn’t airtight just yet. Leavers and throwers can still ruin the ranked experience and it’s unclear how Riot will deal with them.

However, Ranked Rollback is a step in the right direction for Valorant and gaming in general, as this will force other game’s hands to start implementing a similar system.