In addition to cheaters who use third-party software to win, there's another type of dishonest player—those who team up with low-ranked friends to manipulate the matchmaking system and face easier opponents. But that’s about to change, as Riot’s anti-cheat team is now targeting this kind of abuse as well.

What We Know About the Issue
Last night, an account associated with the Valorant Vanguard team made an interesting statement. GamerDoc announced on social media that they are launching an effort to combat players who gain rank unfairly through group matchmaking abuse.

We see parties of 5 players queueing up with one higher-ranked account and several lower-ranked accounts to manipulate matchmaking to get easy wins.
Here’s how it works: a group of five high-ranked players gets together. Four of them switch to much lower-ranked alternate accounts, while one stays on their main. The system then finds opponents with an average rank much lower than the group's true skill level, allowing them to win easily and boost the main account’s rank.

However, this practice is now being targeted directly. According to the Vanguard anti-cheat team, players who abuse matchmaking in this way will receive HWID bans. These bans are tied to a computer’s hardware ID, making them much harder to bypass compared to account bans.

Matchmaking manipulation will lead to hardware bans for all accounts involved in the scheme. It’s important to note that this won’t affect players who honestly climb the ranks with their friends without abusing the system.

It’s still unclear how many players have already been banned for this specific behavior, but Vanguard staff regularly release statistics on cheat-related bans. There’s a good chance similar transparency will follow for ranked abusers as well.