Guide to detect cheaters in Valorant

Introduction

The goal of this guide is to educate gamers to detect and defeat cheaters in Valorant. First of all the most common cheat features are explained and how they work. Next up is the social engineering of a cheater, there a many indicators wich can help you to detect a cheater. And to actually detect/proof that someone is cheating, this guide will teach you how to properly investigate, review a demo and how to properly report a cheater. As you can probably tell im not native english so please excuse my grammer!

Common cheat features explained

Aimbot:

Aimbots in Valorant automatically detect certain hitboxes of an enemy within a certain set fov (field of view) and adjust the aim onto that hitbox. Hitboxes are commonly chest, head, lowerbody etc. Most of the aimbots come in combination with multiple sub features like Smoothing, Max aimbot distance and the already mentioned Max fov range. Aimbot Smoothing adjusts the actual speed of adjusting the aim onto the enabled and detected hitbox of the enemy. This allows to hide/mask the aimbot and not instantly flick onto enemies. Max. aimbot distance sets a certain distance which cancels the aimbot. FOV Range is basically a circle around the crosshair and if a enemy is within this circle the aimbot is activated. Cheaters use high FOV ranges with high Smoothing or low FOV ranges (more flicking) with almost no smoothing. As you can tell, only these features allows cheater to highly adjust their Aimbot settings and stay undetected by enemies/teammates.

Aimbots also come with Anti Recoil Systems, which handle the recoil to a certain set point for the cheaters. Its can also be a standalone feature.

Triggerbot:

If the crosshair is on an enemy the triggerbot will automatically shoot by itself. It comes also with sub features like triggerbot delay and in combination with aimbots themselves. Triggerbot Delays just set a certain delay to simulate human reflex and not instantly shoot and seem like Hiko with his inhuman reactions. Most of the time Triggerbot is used with Operators or also to just hold an angle.

ESP/Wallhack:

Wallhacks allow cheaters to see enemies and certain game models like weapons, Spike through walls. What most people don’t know is that wallhacks are not perfect. The game itself doesn’t allow the cheats to see enemies actually across the map. Most of the Wallhacks only see aprox half of the maps. Wallhacks/ESP also allows cheaters to see the health, ammunition and other information about their enemies. In Valorant especially most of the Wallhacks have issues with Jett, Reyna etc. while they are using their ult. Most of the wallhacks are unable to detect them. There are also some other sub features like max esp distance, which allows the cheater to set a max distance of the esp. All of this is important to detect cheaters in the last topic of this guide.

Detecting a potential cheater

Cheaters have an actual cheating career, and you can abuse this to detect if someone is a cheater. But what is a cheating career? Most of the cheaters started at one point, free cheats. At the beginning most of the young cheaters don’t have a clue about what they are doing and use cheap, bad cheats or just get themselves banned because they didn’t know how to handle them. Cheaters learn overtime and get in touch with better cheats and educate themselves. Also the best cheaters started somewhere, so if you wanna investigate if someone is cheating take a look at their gaming/socialmedia profiles. BUT BE AWARE, cheaters know about this and often invest a lot of time and money to make themselves look legit, but there are some things money can’t buy and that is time. Watchout for Twitter, Discord or other social media accounts connected with a Valorant player/identity. If those are old, and properly used and seem legit (not botted or bought) then the suspect passed the first test. Also take a look at the Valorant account, if the suspect was playing since the beta or for a long time he passed this test aswell. This first step is easy and most of the time helps against obvious cheaters which didn’t put much effort in staying undercover.

Cheaters are greedy for attention most of the time since they wanna flex with their “skills” but they are actually trying to stay unknown/ out of sight for the most of the time. If they are too obvious and get too much attention it’s a potential risk, so keep this in mind. If they play too well people get suspicious and cheaters know about this so many cheaters intentionally lose games/rounds to seem legit. Bad cheaters for example turn off their cheats when you call them out ingame and you can heavily see how bad they suddenly perform. Good cheaters will continue playing well but eventually won’t win rounds to mask it, keep this in mind and try to recognize those situations.

Cheaters try not to completely dominate a game in high ranks atleast, most of the time cheaters try to let the team do the work and if they realize that they start losing a round they step in. Common strategies of a cheater are to win important rounds which snowball the team and not 1v5 clutch ever round. Pistol round or economy reset rounds are those important rounds where cheaters step in and with winning 2–3 rounds with cheats they won the whole game without playing obvious all the time. We will get more into detecting different kinds of cheaters/features in the next topic.

If you get the chance to screenshare with a cheater/ or he livestreams for you to proof he is not cheating keep in mind that cheats can be hidden from obs or similar programs. Wallhacks for example can be rendered on the screen and not in the game, this allows having a wallhack and streaming at the same time. But there are some indicators which allow you to still detect a cheater. First of all ask him to show his downloads folder or check if he has an external drive connected (usb for example), commonly cheaters download their cheats from the web and occasionally a copy of it still sits in the downloads folder. Watchout for random .exe files or weird random names. If he screenshares/streams ask them to switch immediately to full screen/screen streaming and not program/game window streaming. Often cheats are visible when they stream the whole screen. But they can still disable the cheat/unload it while switching to the screen streaming. But still you can checkout the behavior if they get nervous if you ask for that, and if nothing is visible ask him to press insert, home or other keys to check if some sort of a cheat menu shows up.

Also check if the person has his Windows Defender activated and all its modules, most of the cheats and their softwares are detected by anti viruses and therefore cheaters need to deactivate them.

There many more methods and things to check like browser history or navigating to cheat provider websites and check if the login forms autofill etc. but this would be way into depth.

Demo/Gameplay review

Maybe you get the chance to review a gameplay of a cheater with a Stream VOD or in the future demo reviews will be added to the game. This Topic will teach you how to review a demo and what to look for.

Reviewing a gameplay is splitable in two parts, reviewing behavior and reviewing actual mechanics/aim etc. of the player and look for the earlier mentioned cheat features.

Behavior review:

In the behavior review you can mainly detect if a player is wallhacking, in detecting a potential cheater topic a few behaviors are already explained. The most important thing is the map awareness of the suspect, if the suspect is always or often at the right spot aiming at the right angle and the right time it’s a strong indication the person is using Wallhacks. This strongly depends on the ELO of the suspect but even pro players don’t have the perfect timing and map awareness all game long. So with considering the ELO, the map awareness/crosshair placement and overall movement/skill the player has you can consider if the suspect is cheating or not. If a player has a very good awareness and timing but has bad movement and also aim and making stupid plays it’s strong indicator the suspect is wallhacking. Sometimes its very obvious but we are considering that the suspect is a experienced cheater so you have to consider all of these factors. Decision making is the main factor in combination with map awareness, if a cheater stays in a certain position because an enemy is coming towards him but should actually rotate cause a site gets pushed you can tell that they probably have wallhack and this is just an example, wallhackers make unrelatable decisions. Overall check if the player makes stupid mistakes and check if a players plays smart, if a player plays like a beginner but has awareness and aim of a professional it’s a strong indicator he’s cheating.

Mechanical review:

In the mechanical review we watchout for the described cheat features and try to detect them, therefore slowing down the clips can help you. Aimbot is not always easy to detect if the suspect itself already has good aim and high Aimbot smoothing combined with a low Aimbot FOV. But hopefully reviewing a whole or multiple games can help you out since no one is perfect and aimbots often cause weird micro movements wich are detectable with slowing down the clips. If you are lucky the aimbot of the suspect fucks up and shakes/flick trough walls or very obviously. Also watch out for recoil patterns, recoil control systems are easy to detect especially with slowing down the clips. Also since the Recoil patterns in Valorant are random after a certain amount of bullets most of the RCS are only vertically pulling down the aim.

Triggerbots are easy to detect if they are used often within a game, they are coming with a certain play type of cheaters. If you want to investigate in depth you can also compare the reaction times to similar angle holding kills to actually make sure if someone uses a triggerbot since only a few cheats have randomized triggerbot delays. Watchout for suspects holding angles/tight angles all the time and having a very good reaction time.

If you think you have found and detected a cheater, report the player and also report him to Projects like Valorant Anti Cheat Police Department (@AntiCheatPD). AntiCheatPD specialized in gathering intelligence on cheats to detect and disrupt cheating organisations.

Thanks for reading this guide, i hope with all those informations you are able to detect cheaters better. I will update this guide from time to time so check back and if you have questions hmu on Twitter. (@JulienKinsi)