How VALORANT will combat hacking and peeker's advantage ⚡⚡⚡ Esports news, analytics, reviews on WePlay! The latest news on WePlay!
Valorant has taken the gaming world by storm since it was just a rumor. Now, Riot Games has debuted their game and pushed out the closed beta, which has seen an immense amount of success. Over 1.7 million viewers watched the game on Twitch yesterday for the closed beta launch, making it fall just under the record set by League of Legends, another one of Riot Games' success stories.
Valorant is much like Valve's Counter-Strike series in pacing and how the game feels and plays. But, it separates itself in many ways, one being completely new innovation on the side of Riot Games and how they are dealing with hackers and unfavorable mechanics that we often see in FPS titles.
Peekers advantage
One of the most frustrating experiences in shooters is peekers advantage. Peakers advantage is an unfortunate mechanic that is often a result of low tick-rate servers or latency, or a combination of the two. The mechanic makes it so that the aggressor who is peeking around a corner has an advantage over someone holding the angle, making it so that they kill the defender in what seems like a nano-second to the attacker if they even see them at all.
Riot is aggressively combating this with a process called Riot Direct. Riot Direct is an initiative that places traffic hubs in 35 countries, with the goal being to drastically lower ping for everyone playing the game. Riot's goal is to have 70% of the player base playing at 35ms or less.
Another way they are combatting this is by offering 128-tick rate servers. For those that don't know, tick rate is how often the game "refreshes" to the server in a second. Tick rate is often why, at times, you feel like you die in one bullet, or that you shoot on your screen, but the shot doesn't register for the other player. To offer examples, Apex Legends has 20-tick servers, while CS:GO has 64-tick servers. Valorant running on 128-tick is going to feel like a knife through butter, or at least that is the intention anyway.
Wallhacks
Wallhacks, or just aim hacks in general, are an unfortunate happening that we continue to see more and more of in gaming. Coming from someone who had to climb out of Silver in CS:GO, hacking takes a huge hit on the player experience and is something that seems to be becoming more rampant as time goes on. Having amazing anti-cheat is a must for all competitive games nowadays. An example of a game losing players due to lack of anti-cheat is Call of Duty Warzone. If you keep up with Warzone at all, you have seen the immense amounts of backlash that the game receives due to anti-cheat seeming non-existent and hackers running rampant through the game.
Riot Games is combatting this issue with a new technology called Vanguard. Aidan O'Brien over at Gamepur describes this technology in his article, and we will reference it here to provide details on how Vanguard will work:
Cheat detection: Valorant will run two different forms of anti-tamper systems. The first is the system that was developed for League of Legends, and the second is a new anti-cheat system called Vanguard that will allow for what Riot refers to as a "consistently evolving detection method." Vanguard will also allow Riot to ban cheats at the moment that cheating is detected instantly, and they will not need to wait for a reporting system to point out instances of cheating. If you are playing in a game, and the game detects cheating, the cheating player is banned. The game is ended and is immediately forgiven for all players in the game that were playing legitimately.
Wallhack-resistant fog of war: Valorant will employ what Riot is referring to as a "fog of war" system, that will omit player locations from the game data stored in memory until just before the line of sight contact. This means that Wall Hacks, which would traditionally trawl the game data for player position information and display it on the user's screen via an overlay, will be unable to do so.
Say goodbye to speedhacks: All Valorant matches will be server-authoritative, which means that all game settings and parameter authorizations happen on the server-side. This means players cannot alter anything on the client-side, which is traditionally how cheats like speed hacks or teleportation hacks work.
We won't know how Riot Games' new technology truly stands up against these third-party hacks until the game has been live for a period of time. Still, their initiative to implement this type of technology to prevent these things from ruining their game speaks volumes to how seriously they are taking its launch and quality of life. I have a feeling that even if Vanguard doesn't fully address hacking, Riot will make the necessary tweaks to ensure the integrity of their game remains strong.
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