Vanguard Anti-Cheat
Vanguard is a controversial and invasive anti-cheat developed especially for Valorant. Riot says the anti-cheat still has a long way to go, but data gathered from the recent closed beta has helped out a lot. “Up to now, while we’ve been able to track and understand the inputs by which we identify cheaters, many of our ban waves have been manually reviewed and implemented by our anti-cheat team (and they’ve still managed to ban thousands so far). Come launch, we will be more aggressive, widespread, and automated in our ability to detect and ban cheaters.”
No Global Release
The early launch doesn’t come without setbacks: Valorant will not support Middle East or India region, and the game will not be available in Vietnam. For now, at least. While Vietnam players won’t be able to access the game via official means, Indian and Middle Eastern players can. The two groups will be routed to SEA and EU servers, respectively. “You’ll have higher latencies than we’d like, but we figured you’d want to play the game as soon as possible.”
Server Capacity
Over the course of the closed beta, Riot’s servers have been hit with periodical issues due to high traffic. “New datacenters are already being stood up to service player demand in areas where latency isn’t meeting our standards.” The studio says that plans to deploy new servers in Warsaw, Madrid, London, Atlanta, and Dallas are underway. Furthermore, Riot is exploring solutions to the high latency issues of the datacenters in Colombia, Argentina, and Eastern Europe.
Valorant
Putting aside the external issues, Valorant itself has a lot of issues that have yet to be fixed. With only days till launch, players are concerned about problems such as game balance, diversity in the form of maps, agents, and game modes. “From the beginning, we’ve always known this is the beginning of the marathon, not the end, and have been actively working on our next few months of the game. This includes things like new agents, new maps, new skins, and new ways to compete. No spoilers, but they’re coming. This year’s going to be a fun one.” Valorant will be available to play for free on PC on June 2nd, 2020.
