Valorant has not even finished its closed beta and already cheaters are cheating; Riot told us two weeks ago that the first cheater was banned just days after the beta started, and now players are posting evidence of more hacks on Reddit.

One player discovered that a streamer was using a graphic trick to make the normally opaque poison cloud see-through. Paul Chamberlain, Valorant's anti-cheat lead, said, "I'm working with Nvidia to figure out the best way to stop this sort of thing." Definitely do not recommend that people do this."

It's not that hard to detect; it's just that it's not a very easy thing to do.

In another Reddit post, it appears the player is using aimbot. This cheater's team was messing with him throughout the match when it was discovered:

I have also seen a cheater in Valorant using wallhacks on YouTube.

If one person does Aimbot and one person does wallhacks, you can bet that more people will Aimbot and wallhack. My friend Julez said he ran into a party of cheetahs last night.

There has been much discussion about Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat system and its kernel driver level PC access. While some feel it is invasive in principle, Riot says it is necessary to provide the best cheat detection. But does the fact that cheaters exist mean that they have already failed?

According to Chamberlain, just because cheaters are getting away with cheating at the moment does not mean the system is not detecting them. He says, "We'd prefer to ban them immediately, but sometimes it's better to delay so that cheat developers don't know they've been detected for a while." His ambiguous comment, perhaps to avoid saying too much, does not seem to come as a surprise to him that Ambotters exists.

If Vanguard has detected Ambot but has not yet banned the botters because Riot is planning a wave of bans at strategic times, it means they will have to deal with cheaters from time to time for the greater good.

To be fair, that applies to basically every other competitive game to varying degrees. Carnal driver or not, the best someone can do is mitigation: to make sure that eager players don't have to deal with cheaters too often.

But in this case, it will probably take more than one piece of software to gain ground in this war, even if it is just waiting for Riot to pull the trigger on a mass ban.

Valve is using a combination of machine learning, human judgment, and social trust quantification to combat CS:GO hacks; in 2018, Valve analyzed player shots on 1,700 CPUs, looking for patterns that looked funny, and Reportedly, this deep learning system, called VACnet, works in conjunction with Overwatch, a system in which Valve-appointed community investigators review and adjudicate replays of players suspected of cheating. CS:GO has a Trust Factor There is also a rating system.

With all of this, CS:GO still continues to receive complaints of cheating, but CS:GO is not being overrun by these efforts.

Something like CS:GO's Overwatch system is being planned for Valorant, Chamberlain said. It will not be ready for launch because the replay system needs to be built; Chamberlain also said that Riot is "currently experimenting with AI-based aimbot detection." Clearly, Riot is not just taking design cues from Valve.

Vanguard was not intended to be seen as Riot's anti-cheat endgame, but perhaps the ultimate cheat shield. Its always-on nature was controversial, but as Riot points out, other anti-cheat programs such as EasyAntiCheat and Battleye work the same way. This is just one weapon in the arms race between Riot and Valorant's cheaters.

One non-software suggestion from a Reddit user is to add identity verification to the mix: for example, requiring two-factor security with phone numbers in ranked matches.

"I'd like to see more account authentication and security options," Chamberlain said. "We have people working on it, but I don't know what the current ETA is."

With cheater reports on the rise, Chamberlain's informal Reddit comment has provided some relief to Valorant's new player base. At the very least, it is clear that these cheater clips are being seen by those responsible for anti-cheat measures. And if Riot is going to be this aggressive with their anti-cheat software, I will have to disable Vanguard if I want to run a simple CPU monitoring program called Core Temp.

Riot's "anti-cheat technology is moving quickly in this escalating war against cheat developers," Chamberlain said in a statement posted yesterday. It's hard to make any firm judgments at this beta stage, but ranked matches will be implemented soon (probably this week), and a full release of Valorant won't be too far off. Once anyone can create an account and play, Riot's anti-cheat measures will be stepped up a notch.