What we know so far: Riot Games has long been notorious for its controversially strict anti-cheat policies. Although the League of Legends and Valorant maker slightly relaxed its rules earlier this year, bans based on hardware IDs can still have unintended consequences for the used hardware market, one user claims.
A Redditor recently claimed he was banned from Valorant immediately after starting a game after installing a recently purchased AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D. According to the user, Riot said that the CPU’s serial number was already on the company’s anti-cheat blacklist, although Riot says it cannot find the corresponding support ticket.
Assuming the Redditor’s story is accurate, one possibility is that the CPU’s previous owner sold it after being caught cheating. Riot may re-evaluate Hardware ID (HWID) bans through its support channels, but claims Riot told him they had run out of options.
— Phillip Koskinas (@deteccphilippe) October 2, 2026
What’s even stranger is that the user says that filing a complaint against the seller via PayPal wouldn’t completely resolve the issue as other components of his PC, including the motherboard and storage drive, were also blacklisted.
Riot’s Phillip Koskinas disputes this report, saying that Vanguard doesn’t add an entire system to its blocked list just because it detects a banned component. He also dismissed the claim that the entire PC is now banned from all Riot titles, stating that HWID bans are game-specific.
More importantly, Koskinas said that Valorant HWID bans last no longer than four months and that Riot’s support would tell a player how long a ban remains. The Redditor claims that the original lock occurred on August 12th and that he received the CPU on September 21st, meaning the hardware should be unlocked sometime in December.
While banned PC components hitting the used market could worry users looking to save money, Koskinas said Riot has seen fewer than a dozen such cases, suggesting adopted HWID bans are extremely rare. He also said Riot could identify clusters of PCs that act as cybercafés, where hardware bans would only be applied if multiple users repeatedly cheat.
Riot has long courted controversy for enforcing anti-cheat at the kernel level, mandating TPM 2.0, and forcing players to perform UEFI firmware updates that could cripple PCs if something goes wrong. Valorant’s anti-cheat even briefly conflicted with the Battlefield 6 open beta.
However, earlier this year Riot relaxed Vanguard’s always-on requirement with an optional on-demand mode. PCs that meet strict Windows security requirements can enable Vanguard Pre-Check so that the anti-cheat driver starts when a Riot game starts and shuts down after playing, instead of running continuously from system startup.
