Valorant team tricked into surrendering match by fake Riot message

There’s a trend cropping up in Valorant’s matchmaking where people are playing a trick on other teams with a fake notice from Riot’s Vanguard, which can sometimes lead to people surrendering their game.

If there’s ever an instance where Riot detects an active hacker in a Valorant match, the system cancels the game with a red screen saying a hacker was found and subsequently punished.

But trolls in matchmaking come in many forms and some of them are starting to use the /All chat function to get their points across. People have seen these fake notices and it’s all in good fun, but players on the other side of the ruse should at least be aware to not unnecessarily forfeit Rank.

In any part of a game, but typically at the start of it, a giant notice can pop up in the chat to ‘warn’ the people inside of the match that Vanguard has detected a cheater.

Nothing special or immediate happens after seeing the prompt, but the messages sometimes end by telling people that “this match will not be counted towards your current rank.”

Well naturally, if you’re grinding Ranked games, some teams aren’t going to be too keen on playing out a full match if it won’t count to their climb or if a Vanguard-detected hacker is supposedly in the lobby.

After seeing Riot’s message, user ‘oh_mans’ and their team agreed to a Surrender vote just to get out of the game and move on to an appropriate match. The only problem was that Riot never sent that message.

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“Got put in a game with a hacker and was told the game wouldn’t count towards our rank,” they said. “After surrendering we lost Elo and a friend deranked.”

Unfortunately, too many players chimed in to say they too had seen it before and that oh_mans’ team was successfully tricked.

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There hasn’t been an instance yet where Riot directly communicates with a lobby of 10 players through the chat function, so just make sure you scroll up and see who the last person was that sent a message.

While this is a harmless trend, people should just make note that this isn’t how Riot handles hackers to avoid a mishap in your matches.