Valorant's closed beta has been out for about a week, and players are starting to discover more about the game and how it works. Among the most recent discoveries is the fact that part of the game's anti-cheat system, called Vanguard, launches as soon as you start your computer to help prevent more the sneaky forms of cheating.
This issue first came to light when a Reddit user posted a thread on the Valorant subreddit wondering if the start up was intentional. While many of the responses to the thread were skeptical, this is actually something that Riot announced several months ago, before we even knew the game was called Valorant.
In a blog post on the League of Legends website, Riot developer Phillip Koskinas explained that Riot was working on a new kernel driver anti-cheat system. The post explains that the purpose of the kernel driver is to detect cheats that operate on a higher level of Windows' permissions.
While many cheating methods work on the same permission settings as games, newer cheats hook their way deeper into users' computers to avoid detection from anti-cheat systems. So Riot decided to take its new anti-cheat detection to the deepest level it could to detect any cheat above it. Riot needed something on the kernel level to achieve that, and that meant starting the anti-cheat driver as soon as the computer boots up.
While this means that your Valorant games are much less likely to have cheaters than other online shooters with less robust security, some players in the Reddit thread also feared that it could mean giving Riot more access to their computers. But this was another concern answered in the blog post. According to Koskinas, this doesn't give Riot any more information than it already had.
In the Reddit thread, Valorant's anti-cheat lead Paul Chamberlain provided a few more details to help assuage players' concerns.
"The Vanguard driver does not collect or send any information about your computer back to us. Any cheat detection scans will be run by the non-driver component only when the game is running," Chamberlain explained. "The driver component does not collect any information from your computer or communicate over the network at all."
Chamberlain goes a step further, letting players know that they can uninstall the Vanguard driver, called vgk.sys, any time they'd like. The program is called Riot Vanguard and the driver component is called vgk.sys. It needs to be on your system for you to play Valorant, however, and after reinstalling it you'd need to reboot your system so that it can run at startup.
Riot's anti-cheat system isn't the only system that requires it to boot at start-up. EasyAntiCheat and Battleye use kernel drivers as well. Anything accessing a computer at a deeper level, or opening itself on start up should raise concerns about data privacy. But as it turns out, Riot thought ahead about some of these issues and has already stepped in to let players know that the driver and anti-cheat system doesn't do anything other than check for cheats. While there's no way to fully confirm all of the driver's processes that at the moment, Riot's statement should at least provide players with a bit of peace of mind, and prevent them from feeling like they need to delete the driver every time they close Valorant.
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