Valorant Cheating Dispute: ardiis' 60% Claim vs Riot's 4.3% Reply, Act 5 Bans and What the Numbers Show (Oct 2026)

TL;DR: On 13 Oct 2026, streamer and former pro ardiis said that about 60% of his ranked VALORANT games had hackers or win-traders and warned the game could lose viewers and players within six months. Riot's anti-cheat lead, Phillip Koskinas, replied by reviewing one account's recent history and putting confirmed cheating at 4.3% of that account's games. He also agreed that cheating attempts are at an all-time high. The two numbers measure different things, and neither settles how common cheating is across high-rank ranked play.

Timeline

• 13 Oct 2026 – the claim: According to Dot Esports and CyberSportScore, ardiis posted on X that if VALORANT did not fix its cheater problem within six months it would be "GG" for the game's viewership and player count. He wrote that he had "legit had 60% of games with hackers or wintraders." He is described as part of Natus Vincere's creator roster.
• 13 Oct – Riot's anti-cheat lead answers: Koskinas, who leads anti-cheat for Riot, checked the account ardiis had been playing on. As reported by Dot Esports and GameRiv, he said the account had played 23 ranked games in 30 days. It had filed three cheating reports, and only one was confirmed: a player who was banned together with a duo partner for radar cheats. One in 23 is about 4.3%.
• Follow-up from ardiis: Per Dot Esports, ardiis rejected the framing. He told Riot to ask Radiant-level players how many cheaters they face compared with past years. He said Riot's anti-cheat "has been cracked" and that win-traders and cheaters are "at an all-time high." He also warned about the online qualifiers, saying Riot had about three months to fix the problem.
• Koskinas's reply: Koskinas agreed with part of it. The CyberSportScore report quotes him saying cheating attempts are "at an all-time high" and that Riot is "banning almost 3 cheaters per minute." He said the team is "rearchitecting almost the entire product for this class of threat" and that the preventative layers are "smoked." He also said that "wild stats and accusations are universally unhelpful."
• 13 Oct – Act 5 ban numbers: Alongside patch 13.08, which starts Act 6, Riot published penalty figures for the Act 5 detection window (18 Aug to 1 Oct 2026). According to Strafe and Esports Now, that included more than 171,000 accounts banned for cheating, and more than 76,000 for rank manipulation. The figures count bans of three days or longer. Riot said it plans to share them more often.

Both sides

• ardiis's position: Cheating and win-trading in high-rank ranked games is serious enough to threaten VALORANT's audience and its competitive scene. Riot's one-account review does not reflect what top-rank players see.
• Riot's position: The 60% figure does not hold up against the match history of the account Koskinas checked. Riot agrees the threat is growing, says it bans nearly three cheaters a minute, and says it is rebuilding much of its anti-cheat.

What the numbers do and do not show

• The 4.3% figure comes from one account over 30 days and 23 games. It counts confirmed cheating from reports on that account, not everything a player may have suspected.
• Dot Esports notes that the figure does not establish how common cheating or win-trading is across Radiant-ranked matches as a whole.
• ardiis's 60% is his own account of his games. His definition includes win-traders, and the reports we found do not include match IDs or a breakdown.
• The 171,000 Act 5 figure is a count of banned accounts over about six weeks. It is not a measure of what share of games had cheaters.
• We found no independent audit of either figure.

Why it matters

Competitive integrity is the stake. ardiis tied his warning to the upcoming online qualifiers, where unknown players could compete for large prize pools. Riot's own admission that cheating attempts are at a record high, together with the largest category of bans being about cheating-adjacent abuse, keeps pressure on Vanguard. What happens next depends on whether Riot publishes more data, as it says it will, and on whether high-rank players report fewer cheaters in the coming months.

Sources: Dot Esports; CyberSportScore; GameRiv; Strafe; Esports Now; Insider Gaming (patch 13.08). Quotes are as reported by those outlets. Details were checked against publicly available reports on 16 Oct 2026.

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