Valorant Player Inherits Hardware Ban from Secondhand CPU, Riot Responds

Ever bought a used PC part and worried it might come with someone else's baggage? For one Valorant player, that nightmare seems to have become reality. User After-Cartoonist-196 on the German-language PCBaumeister subreddit claims they bought a secondhand CPU, only to discover it carried the previous owner's Valorant hardware ban. That ban, they say, then spread to all their other PC components, making it impossible to play.

Hardware bans are one of the extreme measures esports developers use to fight cheating. They blacklist a specific piece of hardware, so cheaters can't just make a new account. But according to After-Cartoonist-196, Riot support told them the ban was now tied to all their components, and there was nothing the company could do to lift it. They bought the CPU on September 21, and the original owner's ban was logged on August 12.

Riot's anticheat head, Phillip Koskinas, isn't buying the whole story. On Twitter, he said he couldn't find a support ticket matching After-Cartoonist-196's details, calling the tale "pretty unlikely." He pointed out that Riot's hardware bans last a maximum of four months, and support is required to tell you the remaining duration when you ask. He also firmly denied, in two separate posts, that other hardware gets blacklisted when detected alongside a banned component.

But here's the thing: if the ban started on August 12, it wouldn't hit the four-month limit until mid-December. So the core claim—that this player inherited someone else's hardware ban—still seems plausible. It just might not be as permanent as initially presented. Still, getting locked out of your favorite game because of a part you bought secondhand? That's a Kafkaesque ordeal no matter the duration.

The original post was reported by PC World and made the rounds on social media. We reached out to After-Cartoonist-196 after the PC World article but before Koskinas responded. Assuming the Reddit account is truthful, my theory is that a shoddy support response caused a miscommunication about the system ban. Riot is a huge company with many divisions and contractors, so mixed messages can happen.

This whole saga speaks to how invasive modern anticheat measures have become. Kernel-level anticheat is controversial, but competitive developers swear by it. Personally, I'm not a fan, and it's one reason I don't play these esports-centric games anymore. Your mileage may vary.

What do you think? Should hardware bans be able to affect secondhand parts, or is this just a support screw-up? Will you be checking your used components before you buy?