Astralis’ Device devastated by hackers in Valorant, urges Riot to help

Dev1ce himself got called a cheater in Riot's new shooter.

Riot Games’ new title VALORANT may have attracted a lot of attention recently, but it surely wasn’t a pleasant experience for professional CSGO player Nicolai Reedtz, better known by his gaming tag “dev1ce”.

Cheaters in multiplayer shooters aren’t a new thing . CSGO itself is infamous for being home to all kinds of cheaters who ruin everyday matchmaking games for clean players. While Valve, the company behind the game works effortlessly to curb the cheater problem in the game, there’s always a few that slip under the radar.

One of the prime reasons VALORANT gained traction was due to the promise of a world-class anti cheat for the game. Vanguard, the anti-cheat which Riot devs have developed seemed to be doing a pretty good job at doing its task, with it banning their first cheater in under three days of the closed beta release of VALORANT. But as the days pass, cheaters are finding new ways to bypass the advanced anti-cheat by Riot.

There have been many complaints recently about cheaters invading Riot’s new competitive shooter. There have also been instances of such cheats being livestreamed to YouTube. Astralis star dev1ce also seems to have encountered the cheating problem in VALORANT as he has spoken up about it.

Through a tweet made by him on May 2nd, dev1ce calls out VALORANT on having “SO MANY CHEATERS” on board. He mentions one such incident where he himself was called a cheater by his opponents and got “toggled on”. He further mentioned that the opponents openly admitted toggling on cheats without a hint of fear of getting banned.

He also addressed another issue where a solo queue player can get matched against a 5-stack of opponents, even in ranked. He recommends Riot to make a “team queue” for 5-man teams.

While both of the problems he addressed are still relevant in CSGO too, when called out for it in his defense he said that people who “are good” don’t play matchmaking and resort to third-party platforms like FACEIT or ESEA.

If Riot goes along the same path as Valve and fails to resolve the cheater issue in their game, we might need similar third-party platforms for VALORANT too, for a clean gameplay experience.