Demolishing Wallhacks with VALORANT's Fog of War | Riot Games Technology
Hi, I’m Paul “Arkem” Chamberlain, the anti-cheat lead for VALORANT, Riot’s new tactical FPS. I’m part of VALORANT’s game engineering team, and I’m one of many people at Riot working on game security. To learn more about VALORANT security, check out our anti-cheat kernel post, and to read about League of Legends security tech, check out our anti-cheat Tech Blog post.
From the very beginning of VALORANT development, we made it a priority to build out cheating resistance to ensure competitive integrity. In this article, I’ll walk you through one of these anti-cheat systems - Fog of War. This is one of VALORANT’s key security systems, which focuses on combating cheats that take advantage of a game client’s access to information, like wallhacks.
Cheaters use wallhacks to see opponents through walls. In a tactical shooter like VALORANT, this gives them huge advantages when it comes to individual combat encounters as well as strategic decisions for the round as a whole. Wallhacks are especially insidious because they give an advantage that isn’t always obvious - your enemies could be using wallhacks... or maybe they’ve just figured out that you rush B every round. We really wanted to prevent that sense of doubt which lingers with players, poisoning their experiences long after the match.
