Deus ex machina. Ghost in the machine. There can be secrets dwelling in our computer parts. Corrupted files. Spyware. Unused memes. Rarely paranormal spirits, but sometimes a previous life will linger. One German Valorant player reportedly experienced an unforeseen interruption when they were unceremoniously blocked from the game. Were they caught for cheating? No. But the previous owner of their used GPU was.
“I launched Valorant and was immediately kicked out,” posted Reddit user After-Cartoonist-196. “I found this strange because the game ran fine with my previous CPU. When I contacted Riot, I was told that my CPU ID/serial number is blacklisted in the Vanguard system; it had been hit with a hardware ban on August 12th because the previous owner apparently used it to cheat in Valorant.”
According to the poster, they purchased a used Ryzen 7 5800X3D on Kleinanzeigen, a German eBay alternative, in late September. Saving a few euros on the sought after hardware, but unable to exercise the gear on a round of Valorant, they discovered the part was tagged internally by Vanguard, Riot’s infamous internal anti-cheat detection. In a follow up comment, the poster says that even if they were to swap out the GPU for another, Riot informed them that all the parts in their rig had been similarly smeared by the cursed microchip. Short of buying an entirely new rig, “there is nothing” they can do.
“I’m leaving the post up anyway,” says the post, failing to source a clean solution, “perhaps it will help save someone else from a similar situation.”
Perhaps finally answering the ship of Theseus quandary, this wild coincidence illustrates just how thorough anti-cheating technology can be. How far-reaching a digital fingerprint will travel, even when someone else is wearing the glove. Popular anti-cheat systems are capable of tagging individual computer components, from the motherboard all the way down to fancier ethernet cables. It’s not the first time Vanguard has been called overzealous, but as high performance computer parts become a hot commodity, inflating in price and scarcity, how they’ll ultimately be tracked can’t help but leave someone feeling a little haunted.