Valorant Dev Tracker
This thread was added on April 29, 2020, with posts from RiotArkem.
For clarification: there is a decent chance that the anti-cheat software caught this but hasn't banned the player yet. It is common to send out bans in waves to prevent hackers from being able to quickly test what is and isn't detectable.
Yeah, we do both immediate bans and banwaves depending on the circumstances. We prefer immediate bans but sometimes it's better for us to delay so that the cheat developers don't learn that they're detected for a while.
Will you consider implementing a shadow ban system where you only match detected cheaters with other detected cheaters to effectively quarantine them to "cheater lobbies" until they are dealt with in the next ban wave? Other games do this and it's a good method for getting cheaters out of games while still slowing cheat development.
I haven't been a fan of "cheater island" in the past because I always figured that cheaters would quickly figure that they've been flagged (different matchmaking queue time, different quality of matches).
It might be worthwhile if the quarantine time is short enough, for example if banwaves were coming every 12 hours, then maybe flagging the accounts for some sort of soft ban immediately would reduce the damage they do but not give cheat developers much of a head start.
Maybe I'm letting the perfect be the enemy of the good but I'd rather try to get to a world where we were banning all cheaters immediately on detection (which is only partially true today).
Do the cheat developers sell these hacks? Surely immediate bans are always better since there will be less impact on genuine players and the cheat devs will not get enough money to justify continuing to write cheats. Got to battle the cheat devs first imo - cut the cheaters off from their source. But, then again, I’m no expert in this so I don’t really know the dynamic between the cheaters and the cheat devs.
We do try and focus our efforts on cheat developers, even taking them to court sometimes: https://www.pcgamer.com/riot-awarded-10-million-in-in-leaguesharp-lawsuit-settlement/
Ever think of adding 2 factor or verified phone number to accounts that want to play ranked? Seems like that would be a lot more annoying to setup for each account after they get banned
I would love more account verification and security options. We have people working on it but I'm not sure what the current ETA is.
Out of curiosity, why don't game companies have a team dedicated to going to Google and just typing in game name cheats. Hell if you do it for a game like siege you get stuff thats like "Our software hasn't been detected since x time." It seems like the easiest way.
Our anti-cheat ops team does a more sophisticated version of this to keep track of the cheats available on the market. We generally find that the cheats that you can find from Google are low quality or fake but we keep an eye on them anyway.
Any plans on ping lock via region. We had a game last night where one player in the game had 156 ping every one else both sides had 23-35 ping and the 155 ping put up like 34 kills and had some insane peak advantage. Generally in MP games for FPS I find that when I (west coast) play with east coast players its usually no higher than 70 ping and the game seems stable. 156 ping makes me think it was a EU player on the NA severs using that ping to get a serious advantage.
We've talked about it and agree that it could be useful but it's not high on our to-do list.
In our testing players with high ping are a pretty high disadvantage even when peeking. We've tried to make the game in a way that having a bad network connection only makes things worse for you and does not give you any advantages.