Kenneth Williams 
Valorant has announced ranked rollback in order to ensure gamers don’t lose any ranked rating to cheaters, and here’s how it works.
Like many free-to-play multiplayer games, Valorant suffers from a cheating problem. Vanguard is supposed to detect cheaters and hackers in the background, but competitive players have continued to complain about the massive amount of matches that include bad actors. Riot has continued to find new ways to deal with cheaters, and the latest is called ranked rollback.
Here is how ranked rollback will work in Valorant.
What is ranked rollback in Valorant?
In a Dev Update posted on YouTube earlier today, the Valorant team discussed the new ways they hope to keep the competitive integrity of ranked matches in tact. This includes a concept called Ranked Rollback.
Basically, Ranked Rollback will undo any RR a player loses in a match against a cheater once they’ve been caught and banned. Players will ban a cheater they come across and then have to wait until they are banned to get the RR back on their account. This means gamers may have to wait a bit.
The reaction to ranked rollback has been mixed. Many players are excited to see Riot implement more protection against cheaters but others are concerned that cheaters that don’t get banned will get away with permanently lowering an innocent player’s RR. Still, more players will be determined to actively report cheaters in order to get back their rating.
Will ranked rollback stop surfing?
While Valorant’s new ranked rollback should restore lost RR from cheater, it probably won’t work against smurfing.
While it’s easy to report cheaters and hackers, smurfing is a bit tougher for devs to detect. A lot of Valorant players have expressed concern that ranked rollback will not help against smurfing, which is a huge issue in Valorant.
Smurfing is when a high-level player uses a new account in order to get easy wins against lower-level players, stream their grind to the top, or play with friends that are newer to the game. This has become quite a big problem in Valorant and players feel that Riot hasn’t offered any promising solutions that target this specific type of ongoing behavior.
In the dev update, Riot introduced an input-output memory management unit, or IOMMU, that will detect and prevent direct memory access cheats. This has been another tough type of cheat to tackle on PC. but hopefully IOMMU will help as it does on consoles. Still, this won’t really help with smurfing in most instances.
