How Does Valorant's Cheat Protection Work?

How Does Valorant's Cheat Protection Work?

You can think of this piece, written by Paul "Arkem" Chamberlain with statements about Valorant's cheat protection, as being split into the what, why, and how of VALORANT's cheat protection.

"Let's start with the 'why'; why am I talking about this so much, and why are we all putting in so much effort to fight cheating together? Frankly, it's because players (that's all of you) expect and demand this from tactical shooters. Among the things we've committed to for competitive integrity, anti-cheat is one of our core requirements and one of the 'must-haves' for a serious competitive experience.

Let's continue with the 'what.' What are we trying to achieve by protecting VALORANT from cheats? Our goal is to make cheating as rare an occurrence as possible, making the game experience trustworthy. That means preventing as much cheating as we can, and working hard to detect what we can't prevent. We know we can't stop every cheater; but we believe we can reach a point where most players will rarely, if ever, encounter cheaters.

So how are we going to pull this off? How do we think we can protect the game experience against cheaters? This is called the defense-in-depth approach. First, we'll make the game as cheat-proof as we can (Fog of War, server-authoritative movement netcode, etc.). Then, we'll make the cost of developing cheats as restrictive as possible (Vanguard and other anti-tampering measures). Finally, we'll detect, remove, and ban cheaters through Vanguard's cheat detection, hardware bans, player reports, data analysis, and machine learning research.

Is cheating still possible in VALORANT?

Yes, cheating is still possible in VALORANT, and even now it can still be seen in the game, albeit rarely. However, this strategy makes developing and sustaining a lot of cheats much harder. This drives up the cost of buying them, which limits how many cheaters end up in the game. As for smaller communities of skilled cheat developers, since it's easier to track their cheats, we're able to keep them out of our ecosystem through other means as well (such as legal action).

Which brings us to the real big question: How do we know we're winning, and what does success look like?

There are many ways to measure success. We often hear reports like "X number of players banned." Game studios internally use figures like "percentage of players cheating" or "percentage of matches affected by cheating" as benchmarks. While these numbers are useful indicators, they're of secondary importance for VALORANT.

VALORANT's cheat protection system is designed so players can trust the game and have a positive experience while playing. So our main success criterion is how good a job you think we're doing on this front. We track the number of player reports on cheating, ask players directly what they think through surveys, and monitor player sentiment on social media.

Long story short, if you're not happy with us... that means we're not succeeding. Cheat protection exists to serve players, and please don't hesitate to share your thoughts on the work we're doing with us. See you around."

Source: beta.playvalorant.com/