Valorant: Team Besties banned for 18 months
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Valorant, even in the little time it has been around, has had its own fair share of issue and controversy around it. Matters of cheating, match-fixing and bug abusing are not new and multiple teams or players have received penalties or bans for not adhering to Riot’s policies or for not cooperating with their investigations. Recently, another team, Team Besties was issued a ban by Riot Games for similar reasons. This article covers the competitive ruling against Team Besties.
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Valorant: Team Besties banned for 18 months:
Riot Games have set strict rules of conduct when it comes to the competitive integrity of their premier e-sport. This is to address issues like cheating, match-fixing, exploiting and such matters. Despite this, some teams have still been caught abusing glitches and rigging matches. Riot has been quick in their decision and after a thorough investigation, have penalized the parties responsible for it directly or indirectly.
Recently, another team was caught going against the Riot’s code of conduct. It all started back in the month of June in the VCT Game Changers NA Series. Riot Games’ competitive policies clearly state that a team must register all its players before playing a match and the in-game IDs of all players must also be mentioned and registered. All teams that play any competitive Valorant match must confirm that they have read and understood these rules and must adhere to them.
Team Besties was a small, upcoming North American Valorant roster, and was a relatively inexperienced roster. The team was made of Jenna “koi” Tang, Katie “kateuuu” Tran, Mia “kei” Leong, Jasmine “memrice” Huynh, and Jennifer “wetboosy” Li who they registered. Each player was only allowed to register one single ID and not more than that.
Team Besties had a relatively poor performance in the opening matches of the VCT Game Changers NA series, losing 4 out of the 5 matches played. On June 20th however, suspicion arose surrounding the Team Besties player, Kei. Kei had played her first 5 matches of the series picking Sova and had a total kill/death differential of -39. After this, however, Kei strangely started picking duelists like Reyna and Jett and accumulated a total kill/death differential of +44. This sudden change was enough to put her on Riot Games’ radar. On top of this, Kei’s ping also showed slight but suspicious differences. During the first 5 matches, Kei had a stable, 52ms ping to the Texas servers. The next 3 games, however, showed Kei’s ping to be 69ms constantly.
Further, when tournament officials looked deeper, they found that an unregistered account, “arentikawai” had joined the pre-game lobby in the match against 100emoji. This was a problem as this account was never registered. When questioned, Team Besties told the tournament officials that it was the alternate account of the player “wetboosy” who had actually been registered. The tournament officials, however, forced Team Besties to only play using the IDs they had registered.
All this made Riot Games launch an investigation into the team and the matches they had played. The investigation showed voice chat recordings of players asking, “what is the password” among other similar phrases from Team Besties players. Further, they also worked with tournament officials to find multiple login attempts from Kei and wetboosy’s accounts across various locations from North America.
When questioned, initially, Team Besties denied any form of account sharing or ringing, however, when the investigation was concluded, they admitted to having shared accounts among other players causing their immediate disqualification. The players of Team Besties mentioned above along with their manager Bella “soju” Rierad were all banned from any Valorant Competitive event for 18 months. This ban came as a result of Riot’s ringing policy(7.2.7) which prohibited playing under another player’s Riot ID.
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Vishwa Gurumoorthy
(234 Articles Published)