Riot has posted a new blog post detailing it's latest strategy to combat cheating in Valorant, something that the company has been very much on top of ever since the game was released on beta, and they're not playing games, so to speak.

They even went to the extreme length of manually reviewing every play in its online Fire Strike tournament in order to be certain "who every player was" and that every competitor was following the rules. 

In combating cheating, Riot's senior anti-cheat analyst stated that the team have hit a decent "mark" in combating cheating and that the team have "learned a ton" for the next tournament. But in terms of regular games, Riot is also pulling out the big guns.

Only a small number of players are found to be cheating currently, but the team consider this as "still too high" and that "cheaters at the highest ranks also put a stain on the prestige that comes with reaching such heights in a highly competitive game. We saw that some players also looked to bask in the ill-gotten gains of cheaters by teaming with them—knowing that the cheater would get banned after a few games, but they would get to reap the rewards." 

most common question I see around banning the ol' "cheat bus" is "what if they didn't know their queue partner was cheating?". we're really targeting concerted boosting services here, where the results are pretty distinct. precision is a massive priority in these actions. https://t.co/JGrDDOPT9x

— Matt Paoletti (@RiotK3o) January 27, 2021

Riot is now banning players for 90 days if they are found to be using hacks or 'smurfing' - where players pay other more skilled players to level up their accounts for them or drop down to a lower rank with a new account to easily dominate in matchmaking.

According to Paoletti, such players will be "riding the cheat bus on the highway to hell" and that "Rank should be n indicator of your skill."