VALORANT Cheating Crisis 2026: ardiis' 60% Claim, Riot's 3 Bans a Minute, and the Open Qualifier Test

TL;DR: VALORANT's cheating problem became a public fight on 13 October 2026. Former pro ardiis said 60% of his own ranked games had "hackers or wintraders". Riot's anti-cheat lead, Phillip Koskinas, first disputed the number and then agreed that cheating attempts are "at an all-time high". He said Riot is banning "almost 3 cheaters per minute" and rebuilding most of Vanguard. Riot's own Act 5 data shows more than 171,000 cheating bans in about six weeks. That works out to roughly 2.6 a minute. The VCT 2027 Open Qualifiers start in early November. They require Ascendant rank, but that rule is a standard eligibility requirement Riot had already announced. It was not a reaction to the dispute.

Timeline

Date (2026)	What happened	Source
24 Jun	Riot launches Vanguard Pre-Check. Players who meet the Windows 11 25H2 and security requirements can run the anti-cheat "on demand" instead of from boot.	The Verge
8 Sep	Leo Faria, who leads VALORANT esports, answers worries about more online play in VCT 2027: "online does not mean anonymous." Players who advance in the Open Qualifiers will have to verify their identity with a government ID.	Dexerto
9 Sep	A viral clip shows a cheater wiping whole lobbies. Koskinas says the account was banned on 3 Sep after three games and adds: "Agree that we have to improve pre-emptive posture for open qualifiers."	Dexerto
17 Sep	Riot's "Vanguard: Anti-Boost, Pro-Skill" post: "exactly 296,416 accounts" actioned for rank manipulation across VALORANT and League since late 2025.	Riot Games
13 Oct	Patch 13.08 starts Act 6. Riot publishes Act 5 penalty counts, including 171,000+ cheating bans.	Riot patch notes
13 Oct, 15:53 UTC	ardiis posts his "60% of games" claim on X.	X: @ardiis
13–14 Oct	Koskinas checks ardiis's account and calls the confirmed cheating rate 4.3%. He then concedes the record-high trend and says Vanguard is being rebuilt.	Dot Esports, GameRiv
14 Oct, 12:26 UTC	ardiis replies: "Your anti-cheat's been cracked." He warns about the online qualifiers.	X: @ardiis
19 Oct	Registration opens for North America Open Qualifier #1, which requires a peak rank of Ascendant.	VALORANT Esports
30 Oct	NA Qualifier #1 registration closes at 23:59 PT.	VALORANT Esports
5–8 Nov	Europe and North America Qualifier #1 are played online.	Hotspawn, VALORANT Esports

The allegation: what ardiis actually said

This is a claim, not a verified statistic. ardiis (Ardis Svarenieks) won Masters Copenhagen 2022 and now plays for NAVI. His 13 October post read:

"If Valorant doesnt fix the cheater problem in the next 6 months, its gonna be GG for the viewership and player count of this game. Ive legit had 60% of games with hackers or wintraders." (X)

Two details matter:

• The 60% describes his own games. He did not claim it for all high-rank matches.
• The figure combines cheaters and win-traders. Win-trading is rank manipulation, meaning players arranging results to move up the ladder. It is not esports match-fixing.

His follow-up told Riot to "ask anyone at Radiant elo how many cheaters they've faced recently compared to past years". He accused Riot of being "too busy trying to defend your job online" and said "win traders/cheaters are at an all-time high". He also gave a deadline: "You've got 3 months to try and fix this before all the online qualifiers start." (X, Dot Esports)

The schedule makes that window shorter than he suggested. The first qualifiers open in early November, three weeks after his post.

Riot's side

Koskinas runs Riot's anti-cheat team. He replied in two steps.

Step 1: disputing the number. "Just checkin' your math here ardiis," he wrote. Per Dot Esports, he said the account played 23 ranked games in 30 days and filed 3 cheating reports. Only 1 of those reports was accurate: a player banned with a duo partner for radar cheats. One game in 23 is a confirmed-cheating rate of about 4.3%.

Step 2: conceding the trend. As quoted by CyberSportScore and GameRiv, Koskinas said 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" because its preventative layers had been "smoked". He also warned that "wild stats and accusations are universally unhelpful."

In a separate post he blamed part of the surge on AI-assisted cheat development. "It's Claude's world out there, and things are heating up on cheats," he wrote, and he advertised openings on the Vanguard team. The roles listed include a Head of PC Game Security and a Staff Applied AI/ML Scientist for anti-cheat (Dot Esports).

Both numbers are narrow. The 4.3% covers one account and counts only confirmed reports. The 60% is one player's own count and comes with no match IDs.

The ban numbers

Riot posted these counts with Patch 13.08. They cover accounts fully banned for 3 days or longer during the Act 5 detection window, 18 August to 1 October 2026 (Riot).

Ban reason (Act 5)	Accounts banned	Approx. per minute*
Repeated AFK / gameplay abuse	288,000+	~4.4
Cheating	171,000+	~2.6
Rank manipulation (boosting, win-trading, hitchhiking)	76,000+	~1.2
Toxicity / comms abuse	74,000+	~1.1
Botting	54,000+	~0.8
Stream-sniping / instalocking tools	14,000+	~0.2

*Our calculation: the stated minimum divided by the 45-day window (64,800 minutes). Riot did not publish per-minute rates.

How to read the table:

• The cheating count works out to about 2.6 bans a minute. That is close to Koskinas's "almost 3". Riot has not said whether the two figures are counted the same way.
• These are account counts, not people. Riot has not said whether one account can appear in more than one category (Esports Now). The categories should not be added up into a single total of banned players.
• Riot gives no matching count of active players. The data cannot tell you what share of games had a cheater, and it neither proves nor disproves ardiis's 60%.
• Earlier figures: Patch 13.06 reported boosting-related bans at about 1,600 a day. Riot's 17 September post cited 296,416 rank-manipulation actions across VALORANT and League since late 2025 (Riot).

Competitive impact: the VCT 2027 Open Qualifiers

ardiis's real concern was esports. VCT 2027 opens Kickoff to non-partner teams through online Open Qualifiers. The Americas Kickoff has 8 partner teams and 4 slots for non-partner teams. EMEA also sends four qualifiers: two from Europe, one from Türkiye and one from MENA.

Rule	North America	EMEA (Europe, Türkiye, MENA)
Rank requirement	Peak of Ascendant or higher within the previous 6 months	Ascendant 1 or higher at registration or in the previous 3 Acts
Minimum age	17	17
Qualifier #1	5–8 Nov, online, single-elim Bo3	Europe 5–8 Nov, single-elim Bo3
Identity checks	Government ID as players advance (Faria)	Riot platform profile for verification; valid passport encouraged
After the Opens	LAN events	LAN events

Sources: VALORANT Esports (NA), Hotspawn (EMEA), VCT Global Policies 2027.

The Ascendant rule was not a reaction to the controversy. Clause 89 of the 2027 Global Policies sets it as a standing eligibility rule: "Ascendant" or above at registration or in the preceding three Acts. Riot's "Get Ready" post also requires players to be "Vanguard Check compliant". A rank floor keeps out brand-new accounts, but it does not stop a cheater who already reached Ascendant.

Community reaction

• ardiis's first post had about 235,000 views and 2,700+ likes on X by 28 October (X).
• He named several accounts he considers suspicious and said other pros could add more (Dot Esports). We are not repeating those names because none has been confirmed.
• After the September lobby-wipe clip, VLR analyst vladk0r described the worst case for open brackets: "Imagine losing to a team with this s*** only for them being banned later after few rounds of the bracket" (Dexerto).

How this compares with past anti-cheat crises

• Apex Legends, ALGS NA Finals (March 2024). Cheats were forced onto two pros, Genburten and ImperialHal, in the middle of their matches. Organizers postponed the finals because "the competitive integrity of this series [was] compromised" (The Verge). Easy Anti-Cheat said no vulnerability in its software was exploited (PC Gamer). That is the risk VCT's online Opens carry, and Riot's answer is ID checks plus a move to LAN.
• Vanguard's pre-boot gap (December 2025). Riot found a UEFI flaw on some motherboards: the BIOS could report pre-boot DMA protection as on while the IOMMU failed to start. That let a connected DMA device read or modify memory before Windows loaded. Riot restricted affected accounts until players updated their BIOS (Riot, Ars Technica). Hardware-level attacks of this kind, such as DMA devices, are what Vanguard's 2026 changes target.
• The difference this time: Riot is not denying the problem. Its anti-cheat lead publicly says the prevention layer was beaten. The open questions are how fast the rebuild ships and how well it works.

What's next

• 5–8 Nov: the first NA and Europe Open Qualifiers. Any cheating case there will be the first real test of Faria's ID-and-ban deterrent.
• More ban reports. Riot says it will share penalty numbers "more often". The next Act report will show whether cheating bans rise or fall after the rebuild.
• Hardware requirements. Koskinas's 17 September post said TPM 2.0 and MFA requirements could arrive "on an expedited timeline" (Riot).
• ardiis's deadline. His six-month warning runs to about April 2027.

Until Riot shares rank-specific data, any figure for how common cheating is at Radiant level is an estimate, including both 60% and 4.3%.

For the first round of this dispute, see our earlier breakdown: ardiis' 60% claim vs Riot's 4.3% reply. For the structural changes behind the Open Qualifiers, see VCT 2027 partner cuts.

Sources: Riot Games (patch notes 13.08, Vanguard Anti-Boost post, VALORANT Esports qualifier pages, VCT Global Policies 2027); posts on X by ardiis; Dot Esports; GameRiv; CyberSportScore; Dexerto; Esports Now; Hotspawn; The Verge; PC Gamer; Ars Technica. Checked 28 Oct 2026.

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