To restore your elo and prevent cheaters from destroying your heroic-rated battles, Riot is putting in place a system. That’s how it should be with all other competitive games.
You are extremely familiar with this situation if you are a consistently rated player in any competitive game. As soon as you join a competitive match, a teammate informs you when an opponent is cheating in the lobby. The hardest aspect is that you have no choice but to accept the loss while they destroy your squad.
A day after you report them, you receive a notification that they have been blacklisted. However, no matter how hard you try, that message won’t be able to restore your lost elo; you were destined to lose. All that’s left in your mouth is a taste of salt.
To counter this, Riot unexpectedly revealed in a developer update that they are developing a new anti-cheat system called Ranked Rollbacks. Essentially, they will reimburse your lost RR if a cheater is found in your game after the match.
In a nutshell, this is groundbreaking.
The only thing teams could do, depending on the game, to keep their elo from being lost to a hacker was to draw a match. This is typical in Valorant and other round-based games like Counter-Strike 2 and Overwatch 2.
There are a couple of issues with this, though. Not every game can draw, to start. In Overwatch 2, for instance, you can only draw certain game modes; other game modes, like Clash or Flashpoint, won’t end until a winner is declared.
Other competitive games, like Apex Legends or League of Legends, only conclude when one team wins.
The second, and most difficult, aspect of drawing is getting the consent of every other player save the hacker. A cheater will most likely not want to draw if they are duped with another player.
Because of this, you will only ever see this in high-elo lobby areas. Everyone knows everyone in high-ranking matches, and nobody wants to be associated with being a player who is forgiving of cheaters.
All things considered, the drawing process is laborious, unsustainable, and, to be honest, nauseating. For this reason, Ranked Rollback is crucial.
Despite the best efforts, anti-cheat software cannot always stop hackers before they have harmed matches and lobby systems. That notification that a player has been banned is merely comforting.
Nothing is more satisfying than knowing that your elo will not be ruined by a hacker, no matter how skilled they are. Naturally, the system as it is now isn’t perfect. The ranked experience can still be ruined by leavers and throwers, and it’s unclear how Riot will handle them.
But since Ranked Rollback will compel other games to adopt a comparable mechanism, it’s a positive step for Valorant and gaming in general.
