Shooter is probably the genre of video game that’s most affected by cheats and hacks, as any extra information from the game could give players an unfair advantage. Valorant, like Call of Duty or CS:GO before it, has taken extreme measure into combating cheaters, however, looks like it was all in vain. Riot Games definitely needs to do something about the hacks before the game’s official release.
Riot previously has pissed off its whole player base by the introduction of Vanguard, one of the most intrusive anti-cheat software ever - it automatically runs whenever your computer starts. This is a huge security risk, as Valorant is not even turned on when this happens. You would have thought such an unreasonable software would be good at its job - however, looks like the hacking community was one step further than Riot. They bypassed Vanguard and filled the internet with Valorant's wallhack and aimbot.
Valorant touted its gameplay to be identical to CS:GO, and it is just obvious that the game is going to inherit the same weaknesses to these types of hacks. Both aimbot and wallhack are based on the same principle - the reveal of other players' location, with the former taking an extra step of automatically home the player's cursor onto the target.
To combat this, Riot decided to use hackers to beat hackers. They posted a "bug bounty" on HackerOne, a website where companies can put out money rewards for hackers who could point out the weaknesses in their system. This is not the first time they have done this - the program for their other games have been running over the past 6 years, paying out more than 2 million dollars in reward money.
Interested in more of our posts related to this game? Please check out this article for a complete review of the closed beta of Valorant.