Riot blocked expensive DMA cheats for Valorant. Alternatives in the form of custom Valorant bots.

If we describe this story from the perspective of a regular Valorant player, it looked something like this.

In May 2026, a sudden buzz shook the Valorant community. Messages began flooding chat rooms, Discord servers, and forums, claiming that a new update to the Vanguard anti-cheat was allegedly "breaking computers" of cheaters and turning expensive hardware into useless junk.

At first, many thought that Riot had crossed a red line. The company itself added fuel to the fire when it posted a photo of confiscated or blocked cheating hardware with a caption along the lines of: "Congratulations to the owners of the new $6, 000 paperweight." The post quickly went viral across the internet.

To understand the scandal, one needs to know what DMA cheats are.

Regular cheats run on the same computer where the game is operating. Vanguard has been able to detect them for years. However, the most expensive cheating solutions utilize special PCIe DMA (Direct Memory Access) cards. These devices connect directly to the computer and gain direct access to the RAM, bypassing many Windows and anti-cheat protection mechanisms. Sometimes, a second computer is even used to analyze the game data separately from the main PC. The cost of such setups can reach several thousand dollars.

In the spring of 2026, Riot released a Vanguard update that began strictly enforcing a security mechanism in Windows and modern motherboards called IOMMU. Its job is to control DMA devices' access to the computer's memory. Following the update, many popular DMA solutions stopped working in Valorant.

This triggered a wave of panic among cheat providers and their clients. Some claimed that their devices were no longer being detected correctly, errors started popping up, and they had to reinstall Windows or tweak BIOS settings just to restore functionality.

That was when the debate over legality sparked.

One side argued:

• December 2025 — Riot reports a security vulnerability related to DMA and IOMMU.
  
• May 19–22, 2026 — Vanguard update against DMA cheats goes live.
  
• May 21–23, 2026 — Riot publishes the famous "$6, 000 paperweight" post, sparking the scandal.
  
• End of May 2026 — The internet debates whether an anti-cheat has the right to block specialized hardware so aggressively. Riot responds that nothing is being "bricked" and that they are only utilizing native Windows and motherboard security mechanisms.
  

For a regular, honest player, this story had virtually no impact on gameplay. The primary blow landed on the owners of expensive hardware cheats, which had long been considered almost untraceable by anti-cheat systems.

There is a serious issue in Valorant regarding the use of specialized bot software (so-called "leveling bots" or XP bots) that run instead of real players. Typically, such third-party programs are used to automatically farm in-game experience, in-game currency, or to quickly unlock new agents on an account. The bot simulates basic activity in a match — walking randomly, shooting at walls, or jumping in place so that the built-in AFK (away from keyboard) protection system doesn't kick it from the lobby. Such automated software heavily damages the competitive aspect of Valorant, ruining the game for random teammates. Because of this, developers from Riot Games are actively fighting bot creators, improving their Vanguard anti-cheat to detect and permanently ban them. However, objectively speaking, bot software development continues, and you can order custom development from us at garantmarket.net. Read more about bot software development.