If you’ve ever been a victim of a hacker in VALORANT, you know how frustrating it is to lose RR due to a situation completely out of your hands. But Riot Games has revealed it will implement a new feature called the Ranked Rollback to restore that lost RR.
In a blog post today, VALORANT data engineer Jose “the3” Chavez explained that the developers don’t want to lower the number of matches that a cheater plays before getting caught because doing so would allow the cheat creators to adapt their software, test with a new account, and see which version avoids Riot’s detection systems.
In fact, Chavez said Riot is able to detect when a cheater has entered a game almost immediately, but they’d rather delay a ban on cheating accounts so they can keep their detection methods a secret. It isn’t completely foolproof, but it makes sense since it would cause the cheat developers to scramble when several clients report they’ve been banned at different times.
“[The cheat developers will] quickly figure out how we detected them, build around that, and sell their cheat as ‘undetected’ for the 34th time,” Chavez said. “Sure, we’ll end up getting them again eventually, but adding a delay to our bans slows down this development process for cheaters, which keeps our detection methods valid for longer.”
Riot does, however, understand how delaying the ban on cheating accounts will ruin games for many people. Luckily, the devs are also introducing Ranked Rollback as a quick solution for those who have lost RR due to a cheater during their climb. After an account has been banned for cheating, Riot will undo all of the RR lost for any who played against that user before their removal from the server.
Granted, this isn’t a perfect system, but in a world where cheats are becoming harder and harder to detect, Riot must use as many options as possible to maintain the competitive integrity of the ranked climb.
