Remember last year when folks lost their minds over Valorant’s kernel-level anti-cheat? Well, it’s here to stay, and moving forward it might be a trend for many future games, and Riot has continued to sing its praises in a recent blog post on the current state and future of Vanguard, its anti-cheat software. Riot writes that “report rates are at an all time low,” but it’s not resting on its laurels because the folks who make those cheat programs sure aren’t.
“Combating cheating is not a ‘set it and forget it’ solution like an advanced anti-cheat or some sentient AI – it’s a continual arms race. […] There’s been an increased popularity in hardware cheats. These are cheats that depend on an external piece of hardware to run functionally, intended to try to bypass both protections and detections implemented by the team. Cheat developers have also instituted other novel ideas, such as machine learning algorithms.”
Unsurprisingly, the studio says it will “continue to iterate on the best version of Vanguard with an emphasis on keeping cheaters out of the ecosystem for good.” It’s also looking into “fighting other forms of game integrity abuse, where cheats may be indirectly used to gain an unfair advantage.” Specifically, that means punishing players boosted by cheating accounts, using Riot’s “automated measures.” Now, if it could add some kind of PvE horde mode…
