The intrusive anti-cheat that comes coupled with Riot’s new competitive shooter, Vanguard, has turned more than a few heads in recent weeks as users attempt to explore precisely what root-level access is. Lines in the sand were already drawn and quartered well before Valorant looks to officially release, and more than a few bad actors have entered the fray in an attempt to undermine the anti-cheat efficacy. In spite of Vanguard having one of the most intrusive anti-cheat systems ever, however, it’s factual the title already has more than its fair share of problems with cheaters entering the title and ruining matches for everyone.
In an apparent attempt from Riot to quell some of the more irate consumers in regards to the intrusive system, they took to Reddit to announce upcoming changes to the Vanguard system that will hopefully allow more transparency and control offered to users that wish to play Valorant.
First, Vanguard will now show up in the system tray in the bottom left of your PC. Using this new icon, users will be able to turn off Vanguard at any time they wish. In order to play Valorant, however, they’ll need to perform a system reboot. This feature will allow users that believe Vanguard is slowing their system to completely remove the system from running at any time of their choosing, and restart it when they wish to play Valorant again.
Heading into this weekend: we're actively working on a number of server stability issues, and think we have fixes in for people with unusually low framerate and a solve for the 6v5 exploit. Looking into a few other errors that are popping up. Thanks for your patience!
— VALORANT (@VALORANT) April 24, 2020
Secondly, users can opt to simply uninstall Vanguard in its entirety from the system tray; launching Valorant will reinstall the software. If users wish to, they can disable Vanguard from showing up in the systems tray.
Along with the new icon in the system tray, a notification will appear if Vanguard blocks an application from launching. Vanguard automatically blocks vulnerable software in an attempt to stymie bad actors from loading incompatible software, which is typically used to side-load a modification (i.e. cheat).
Riot was eager to note that they are not planning on publically documenting changes with Vanguard, as obfuscation is part of the ongoing, and neverending, battle against cheaters.
Riot closes their message by repeating that they are not selling your data to shadowy entities in China and that they take competitive integrity seriously. Frankly if dealing with Vanguard means I won’t have to match with dozens of cheaters a day, as currently witnessed by players of Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, than it’s more than welcome in my own opinion. Conversely, if Valorant is filled to the brim with cheaters upon launch, they’ll have a lot of explaining to do.
