Valorant has not long launched out of its beta phase which saw players having to watch Twitch streams to gain access, and during the beta, players who were caught cheating were banned. However, it seems banned players are still banned despite the game officially launching.

Anti-cheat lead Paul Chamberlain spoke with IGN, explaining that "All cheating account bans are permanent for the account," and explains that most of the bans come with a hardware ban. “Most cheating account bans also come with a hardware ban, meaning we track their souls through time and space and ban them again when they try to re-enter the game with a fake mustache.”

However, while these players may not be able to jump into the game, it seems Riot Games do review and lift some bans. “I can’t reveal too much here, but I will say that not all of these bans are permanent, and we do periodically review them to lift specific ones. At release, we have reviewed all existing hardware bans and unbanned some of the less egregious offenders. We are not planning to remove any more hardware bans until our next periodic review.”

Last month, Riot Games' Anti-cheat Data Engineer Phillip Koskinas revealed that over 8873 players had been banned by the studio's Vanguard anti-cheat system. He also detailed that some accounts would be unbanned when the game launches, but did mention that the bans were only "game-specific". He also stated that bans weren't "exclusively based on hardware" but that they were looking into it.

Valorant is now available for free on PC and is being prototyped for consoles.