Thousands of Valorant players are watching cheaters streaming on YouTube

Has Riot's Vanguard already fallen vulnerable to hackers even before its official release?

Riot Games’ take on the first-person shooter genre had taken the video-game industry by storm. The release of VALORANT’S closed beta gained worldwide traction and immense popularity among gamers across all genres. The release of the closed beta of the game on April 7 saw it breaking several records of other giant titles in the esports industry.

The success of VALORANT could be foreseen long before the closed beta was out. Riot had earlier announced that their upcoming competitive shooter would possess 128 tick servers across matchmaking, performance optimization even on decade old PCs and a world-class anti-cheat engine – Three key factors based on which the popularity of the game expanded.

Riot’s anti-cheat engine, which was named Vanguard, had been doing a terrific job till now in keeping cheaters at bay. Vanguard had detected and banned their first cheater in under 3 days of its closed-beta release. But now, things might just be getting out of hand – and it’s not just another small bug this time.

Photo: Riot Games

The video is available here.

Even though Riot devs had previously claimed to be proud of the work they had put in Vanguard, it appears that cheaters have already found a way to bypass the anti-cheat by Riot. A video that has surfaced on YouTube recently shows a player blatantly using cheats in the game and that too, on-stream. The cheat used by the player included aim assistance and visual assistance – both of which are offences that should lead to an immediate ban.

However, Vanguard seemed to be completely unable to detect the anti-cheat at all as the player continued to use cheats for over 45 minutes before deciding to put an end to his stream. It’s alarming that even by the end of his stream he wasn’t banned.

Many people had switched from games like CSGO to VALORANT after getting tired of the cheaters, and cheaters invading this game too might give them a reason to switch back to the alternatives. We’re hoping that this blatant cheating stream will soon catch Riot’s attention and that they’ll hopefully take steps to curb the cheaters at the earliest.