A Redditor in Germany says their second-hand Ryzen 7 5800X3D came with someone else's Valorant ban attached. Posting on r/PCBaumeister, user After-Cartoonist-196 explains that they picked up the processor on the classifieds site Kleinanzeigen and took ownership on September 21. The chip ran without any issues until they opened Valorant, which booted them straight out. The game had worked fine on their old CPU.
They contacted Riot support and were apparently told that the processor had been on Vanguard's blacklist since August 12, the result of a hardware ban handed to the previous owner for cheating. According to the post, the motherboard and storage drive in the buyer's PC were flagged too, and Riot support wouldn't remove the restriction manually.
Riot's anti-cheat boss Phillip Koskinas later weighed in on X, and his version is a little different:
"Hardware bans last 4 months maximum, they apply only to the game cheats were detected in, and we don't ban "everything else" when we match one component. Support will give you the time remaining on request. If it were up to me, we'd have soul bans that followed them into hell."
That last line is overly enthusiastic, but going by his timeline, the ban on this particular chip should run out around mid-December, and it shouldn't touch Riot's other games. It also contradicts the claim that the rest of the PC got blacklisted, so we don't really know what happened with the motherboard and drive.
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How does Riot calculate the expiration date of a Valorant hardware ban with a four-month maximum?
What can buyers do to check a used Ryzen 7 5800X3D for a prior Valorant hardware ban before purchasing it?
What options does a Valorant player have if Riot Support will not manually remove a hardware ban from a second-hand CPU?
Can a Valorant hardware ban remain active if the banned Ryzen 7 5800X3D is installed in a different PC?
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Riot hasn't said how Vanguard can pick out one 5800X3D from thousands of identical ones. Vanguard has been getting more aggressive on the hardware side this year, having blocked DMA cheat devices in May, and its newer On-Demand mode leans on TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. As for buying on the second-hand market, I think the only real protection is asking the seller, since buyers can't look up a chip's ban status themselves.
