Vanguard hits new 'bans-per-second' record

Summary

Greetings travelers, I’m Phillip “mirageofpenguins” Koskinas, a data-based anti-cheater on the Vanguard team @ Riot. We saw a brief increase in reports on VALORANT over the past month, mostly in some of our more popular regions like Brazil, so we wanted to give a quick regional update on our never-ending war with cheaters and their apparent inability to get good at the video game.Status ReportFirst things first, you weren’t hallucinating—there were definitely more cheaters over the last few weeks, but we’re thrilled to announce that they are rapidly falling back down to “optimal” levels.Riot’s holiday break halts our release processes, so no new updates or hotfixes can go out to players. Cheat developers once again proved themselves to be perfectly willing to take advantage of the opportunity this presents, and without regular, new detections to deal with, even unsophisticated cheaters can quickly overwhelm a tactical FPS like VALORANT, where something as simple as a triggerbot can still be a massive advantage. So, while we were at reduced capacity, the cheaters that weren’t immediately detected started multiplying, a lot like a brainless pathogen.(Red = Asia Pacific, Orange = Brazil, Green = Europe, Purple = Korea, Gold = Latin America, Blue = North America)Above is our percentage of ranked VALORANT games with a cheater, broken down by region. Interestingly enough, the spikes coincide almost exactly with Riot’s holiday code freeze, and indeed, we are at our weakest when we cannot ship new detections. However, now that we’re back and the code has fully thawed, the kitchen is once again pumping out all 12-courses of anti-cheat with love and reckless abandon, bringing the percentage of ranked games with a cheater back down below 1% globally. We are optimistic that it will stay this way for several months, and in the future, we’re going to try and pre-plan “surprise” updates for cheaters to deal with over breaks in an effort to make sure they don’t ever get to play on ...