VALORANT is here!

The VALORANT closed beta is open in NA and EU and the response has been overwhelmingly positive!

However, the interest from cheaters has also been very high and we had to ban our first cheaters during the first week of the closed beta.

Well it sucks, but today we had to ban our first cheater (and it looks like more bans are on the horizon).

I was hoping for a little more time before this fight kicked off but we're in it now and we're ready.

— Paul Chamberlain (@arkem) April 9, 2020

There's also been a lot of interest around the details of the Riot Vanguard anti-cheat system, especially the kernel component. I ended up talking on reddit about it a fair bit and even got some interest from the gaming press (I sent written statements to some outlets, don't know if they'll run the articles though Edit: Ars Technica, Kotaku and Polygon).

I also wrote a big article about the VALORANT Fog of War system that I'm really proud of. It has some gameplay clips and some illustrations I made as well as a good overview of the road we took to shipping that system.

It's been a really busy first week but it's all looking really promising!