Cheaters in Valorant are already using aimbots and wallhacks

During the past few weeks since the launch of the Valorant's closed beta, the anti-cheating system behind the game has been a hot topic amongst gamers and journalist alike.

Called Vanguard, the system uses a kernel-mode driver, meaning that it has full access to anything on your computer and an especially problematic thing was the fact that it launches at the start of the system and works even if you don't play the game.

This all started the massive outrage on the internet and continuos negative campaign towards the game because of it, which eventually led to Riot giving players more control over their anti-cheat system.

• Read more: Valorant players discover Omen exploit that allows you to see through walls

But it looks like that even with all these anti-cheat measures, players are already finding ways to use cheats, and the game is not out of the closed beta yet. During the last few days, Valorant players on Reddit shared a couple of cases of people using various cheats in the game, such as wallhack, aimbot, and abuse of the graphic settings.

As you can see in the video above, Jett player cleary used aimbot in this game. RiotArkem quickly responded in the thread to explain the situation:  "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."  

One Reddit user asked him if they are considering a shadow ban system where you only match detected cheaters with other detected cheaters to effectively quarantine them to "cheater lobbies", to which he responded: " 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)."

He added: "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."

• Read more: Valorant Developer Q&A: discuss peeker’s advantage, tagging, ragdolls, Omen buff, left-hand models & more

Some players are even using smarter ways of cheating, by abusing graphic settings so that they can see where they usually shouldn't be able.

Reddit user Schwartzov reported about the case where a player in the enemy team was killing them through his poison cloud during the whole game. When he checked his stream, the game was heavily modified visually to the point it didn't even look like the game and that allowed him to see enemies through the cloud. It was quickly confirmed that it's a super low LOD level via NVIDIA settings, and RiotArkam once again confirmed that he's already on it and that he's "working with Nvidia to figure out the best way to stop this kind of thing."

Players are also already spotting various players using wallhacks in the game, some are even streaming it shamelessly. People are also exploring some possible map exploits, but it is not clear if this kind of things is a legit strategy or an actual exploit of the map.

All in all. there's still a long road ahead if Riot really wants for Valorant to be clear of cheaters, as it looks like the system even now in closed beta isn't able to recognize all of the cheating players. It is clear that Vanguard is not working perfectly, even with a kernel driver, there are still some cheats being able to slip through.

Lockdown: Valorant bounty and Nintendo Switch stock