"Why do I still lose RR?": Valorant player wants Riot to change hacker ban system, community reacts
Facing hackers in Valorant matches is a rare phenomenon. Hackers in FPS games are quite common these days, considering the massive surge in the number of cheaters. However, as Riot uses Vanguard anti-cheat, players find it hard to run cheating software in the background. Being a kernel-level anti-cheat, it’s difficult for them to beat.
That said, with technology advancing by leaps and bounds, there’s a chance of facing hackers even in Valorant, which could give you a hard time. Riot Games has a punishment system for hackers, as hardware bans are handed out for their wrongdoings. However, the one thing you’ll never retrieve is your lost RR (Rank Rating).
Even if you face a hacker in your lobby, and they get a ban, you’ll never recover your lost RR since the developers haven’t added the feature yet. Valorant players worldwide have discussed this issue numerous times over multiple social media forums. A user u/FrameOfDoor on Valorant’s subReddit urged the developers to provide a feature to recover their lost RR. They asked:
“Why do I still lose RR?”
User u/B3GG mentioned a few FPS shooters like Overwatch 2, and Rainbow Six Siege that already have this feature.
u/anderkimi expressed their discontent with Riot only being interested in spending their asset on designing animated skins. The company doesn't seem too concerned about those trying to achieve decent ranks in-game.
They said Riot knows that the more players get angry about their ranks, the more time they will spend on it.
User u/6packBeerBelly, meanwhile, replied to the original post, mentioning that Valorant's developers will face a hard time on the database end. Even if they implement the recover RR feature, adjusting the MMR table based on regional rankings would be a difficult task for them.
User u/Haikal0 explained the same logic as u/6packBeerBelly about adjusting the current MMR table. According to the user, judging from the Match History section on Valorant, the developers are not likely to save the data from the previous acts. Even if they do, it’ll be quite challenging for them to adjust RRs for each player worldwide.
On the other hand, they explained how we’re only focusing only one perspective of the issue. Even if the developers provide players with their RR accordingly, there must be others who would’ve played with a cheater without their knowledge.
Hence, they will surely lose a certain amount of RR suddenly and they might complain about this reduction in their RR without any specific reason since they’re not responsible for it. The user mentioned:
"Probably too much effort. Judging by the fact that we can’t scroll through match history all the way down might be because they don’t have all match data, if that’s the case then it’ll be impossible to do what you want."
u/Haikal0 said compensating everyone for all previous competitive matches would be difficult:
Even if it’s not the case, it’d be unnecessarily difficult to take all previous competitive matches and compensate everyone accordingly. Even then people would still complain because they lose RR all of the sudden because they happen to play with a cheater.
Lastly, a Valorant fan, u/Petercraft7157, raised another concern, suggesting the smurfing problem in-game. According to the user, most players often face others who smurf, ruining their gameplay experience since the latter belong to a way higher lobby than they’re usually playing.
The user suggested that if any smurfs get detected in-game, the opponent must not lose any RR. However, Riot has already taken some anti-smurf measures to tackle the scenario. They mentioned:
"You don't encounter that many hackers but smurfs are the real problem. I played 5 games yesterday and I found six smurfs. If someone gets more than 3-4kd at the end of the game depending on rank you shouldn't lose RR and he should be banned."
Should Valorant's developers restore lost RR for matches affected by hackers?
The Valorant community has different opinions about not restoring the lost RR scenario. Considering the fiasco online, Riot must give this a thought. Despite facing several drawbacks in the database section, restoring RR for matches affected by hackers will be appreciated by the community.
It's quite evident that legitimate players will unfairly lose their RR against exploiters. If they can somehow recover their lost rating in-game, that should motivate them to keep playing the game in the future.
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