Valorant dev reveals anti-cheat change coming amid massive ban wave
RiotValorant’s head of anti-cheat has confirmed that a big change is in the pipeline as they’re cracking down on the rise of hackers.
When Valorant first launched, Riot Games boasted about their robust anti-cheat system — Vanguard. They’ve even offered bounties to people if they could find vulnerabilities in the anti-cheat that would-be hackers could exploit.
Despite the power behind Vanguard, cheaters have been able to infiltrate the system. Riot have banned millions of hackers over the last few years. However, over the recent holiday period, there has been a noticeable spike.
This increase in hackers led to numerous outcries from players for Riot to fix things. Well, as we enter 2025, that has now been addressed.
Valorant has had tonnes of new cheaters in the last month
Phillip Koskinas, Riot Games’ head of anti-cheat, revealed that they’ve banned almost 100,000 cheaters in 2025 already.
“Saw a lot of VALORANT cheaters accumulate over the holiday, but we’re back and happy to be handing out their gifts,” the Riot dev posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, before revealing an upcoming change.
“Cheaters don’t take breaks, so thanks for letting us get a small respite—we can hit so much harder now. Soon, future bans will include ranked rollbacks.”
Koskinas was quizzed on how the ranked rollbacks would work after one fan used the example of what would happen if they benefited from having a random cheater on their team.
“You’ll keep yours, and enemies will get theirs back. It’s slightly inflationary, but we’ve run the numbies and we’ll be okay,” he replied.
As the dev pointed out, hackers come in a number of different forms, but the number of repeat offenders being banned is substantial.
Players also noted that they’re glad a clampdown has started. “So basically everyone was right and there were a ton of cheaters who were playing over the holidays,” one said.