Riot Announces Valorant Official Launch Date And Deep Dives Into Vanguard Anti-Cheat System

valorant reactor a bannerRiot Games’ Valorant is finally launching early next month after nearly two months in closed beta. The studio announced that the highly-awaited competitive shooter will officially be opening its doors on June 2nd. The announcement was made via a new dev update video and a lengthy blog with some pertinent launch information.

The blog also goes into detail about the lessons that Riot learned during the game’s closed beta tests along with an in-depth look at their “controversial” but effective in-house anti-cheat system called Vanguard. The studio assured players that they put in a feature that will allow players to easily disable the Vanguard process until it’s needed. They also offered a $100,000 bounty to anyone who can find a way around the system. The big question is, how effective is the system at detecting cheaters?

“Now the real question: has Vanguard been effective at tracking and deterring cheaters? Well… yes to the first, and not yet to the second. With VALORANT being the grand unveiling of Vanguard, we’ve gotten a lot of inputs that help us understand what cheats - and forms of cheating - we can effectively deter with the platform. But during closed beta we’ve held off on deploying the second half of our tech, our auto-banning systems, because we needed this time to understand what to action on, especially when it comes to hardware bans.”

Riot says that, once the game launches, Vanguard will not only have the capability to auto-ban cheaters, it will also be more aggressive in detecting potential cheats and hacks. They also talk about disruptive chat behavior in the game and how they will be handling reports. This includes automatic report handling and chat analysis, and 72-hour chat and voice restrictions for violators.

The studio also says that they’re planning on adding new servers in key locations including Atlanta, Dallas, London, Madrid, and Warsaw and will be looking at ways to improve latency in Argentina, Colombia, and Eastern Europe.

Watch the official launch announcement from Executive Producer Anna Donlon and Game Director Joe Ziegler after the jump. You can also head over to the Valorant official site to learn more.

Important news on VALORANT’s launch date