Valorant player claims to have inherited hardware ban through secondhand CPU, Riot anticheat boss disputes parts of story

• User After-Cartoonist-196 on the German-language PCBaumeister subreddit claims to have bought a CPU secondhand, but that it carried the previous owner’s Valorant ban.
• Extreme surveillance measures have been adopted by esports devs in recent years to combat and punish endemic cheating in their games.
• Riot support allegedly told them this ban is now associated with all of their other PC components, and there is nothing the company can do to lift the ban.
• Riot anticheat head Phillip Koskinas asserts that the company’s hardware bans last four months, and cannot “infect” other components when inserted into a new system.

After-Cartoonist-196’s original post was reported on by PC World, and has independently made the rounds on social media as well. They say they bought the CPU on September 21, and that the original owner’s ban was logged on August 12.

On Twitter, Koskinas said he was unable to find a support ticket matching After-Cartoonist-196’s details, and that the story is “pretty unlikely.” Koskinas pointed out that Riot hardware bans have a four month maximum duration, and that Riot support is required to provide the remaining duration of the ban when responding to a ticket.

That does leave much of the original story intact still: If the ban began on August 12, it will not hit the duration limit until mid-December. Koskinas firmly debunked one aspect of the story, though: He denied, in two separate posts, that a system’s other hardware is blacklisted when detected alongside a banned component.

We reached out to After-Cartoonist-196 after the PC World article was published, but before Koskinas’ public response. The core of the story⁠—that this player inherited another’s hardware ban⁠—still seems plausible, and while not as drastic as initially presented by After-Cartoonist-196, it would certainly be an aggravating, Kafkaesque ordeal to get locked out of your favorite game in such a way, no matter the duration.

Assuming the original Reddit account is fully truthful, my theory would be that a shoddy support response resulted in the system ban miscommunication—whatever the official policy cited by Koskinas, Riot is a large company with many divisions and external contractors.

The story speaks to the invasiveness of the most advanced anticheat measures in effect today. I’m not a fan of kernel-level anticheat, myself, but competitive game developers swear by it. Your mileage may vary: I just don’t really play this kind of esports-centric competitive game anymore for this, and a host of other reasons.