A Valorant player has claimed to have inherited a hardware ban through a secondhand CPU purchase, with the previous owner's ban allegedly transferring with the component. The user, posting on the German subreddit r/PCBaumeister under the name After-Cartoonist-196, stated they bought the CPU on September 21, but the ban was logged on August 12. Riot support reportedly informed the player that the ban was now associated with all their PC components and could not be lifted.
However, Phillip Koskinas, Riot's head of anticheat, has disputed elements of the story. Koskinas stated on Twitter that he was unable to find a support ticket matching the user's details and called the claim "pretty unlikely." He clarified that Riot's hardware bans have a maximum duration of four months and that support is required to provide the remaining duration of any ban when responding to inquiries. If the ban began on August 12, it would not expire until mid-December.
Crucially, Koskinas firmly denied that a system's other hardware components become blacklisted when detected alongside a banned component. This counters a specific claim made by the original poster regarding how the ban might have propagated.
Despite these clarifications, the core of the player's claim—that they received a hardware ban attached to a component they purchased secondhand—remains a possibility. Such a situation, even with a limited duration, would represent a frustrating experience for the player. One theory suggests that a miscommunication or a flawed support response may have led to the reported issue, especially considering the complexity of a large company like Riot Games with various divisions and potential external contractors.
The incident highlights the lengths to which developers go to combat cheating in competitive games. Measures like kernel-level anticheat are employed, which, while effective in some regards, also raise questions about system invasiveness. The ongoing debate about such anticheat methods continues as developers strive to maintain fair play.