There has been an outcry and outpouring of criticism leveled at Riot Games for its use of an invasive form of a new anti-cheat system in its FPS game Valorant. While the developer had announced that it was utilizing a new form of anti-cheat system prior to the closed beta of the game, the League of Legends developer failed to mention that it would constantly be running. However, shortly after the revelation broke, a Riot Games dev responded to the criticism and confirmed that the invasive anti-cheat system was intended to run on startup.
Valorant anti-cheat Lead RiotArkem took to Reddit shortly after Reddit users started to complain about the anti-cheat system starting up when a PC boots up and staying on even when the game has been exited. Confirming that the system running on startup was intended, RiotArkem stated,
“Yes we run a driver at system startup, it doesn’t scan anything (unless the game is running), it’s designed to take up as few system resources as possible and it doesn’t communicate to our servers. You can remove it at anytime.
Vanguard contains a driver component called vgk.sys (similar to other anti-cheat systems), it’s the reason why a reboot is required after installing. Vanguard doesn’t consider the computer trusted unless the Vanguard driver is loaded at system startup (this part is less common for anti-cheat systems).”
While the developer states that Valorant players can remove the anti-cheat system “at anytime, the user has to go to the Add/Remove program in order to delete it (it is designated Riot Vanguard). This also doesn’t negate the fact that Riot Games does not provide a prompt informing the user about what is being installed or how it operates.
As for why the anti-cheat system runs on startup, the developer went on to explain,
“This is good for stopping cheaters because a common way to bypass anti-cheat systems is to load cheats before the anti-cheat system starts and either modify system components to contain the cheat or to have the cheat tamper with the anti-cheat system as it loads. Running the driver at system startup time makes this significantly more difficult.”
The explanation offered makes sense, but doesn’t address claims that the driver component is allegedly affecting the PC’s performance and the performance of other games not developed by Riot. This particular claim was shut down in the Reddit Valorant channel as mods closed the thread.
However, RiotArken goes on to claim that the anti-cheat system doesn’t collect any information stating, “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.”
Unfortunately, the explanation did not address the claims that, upon installation of the anti-cheat system, the PC’s performance is being affected for some users.
RiotArken goes on to conclude,
“We think this is an important tool in our fight against cheaters but the important part is that we’re here so that players can have a good experience with Valorant and if our security tools do more harm than good we will remove them (and try something else). For now we think a run-at-boot time driver is the right choice.”
Riot Games, which is owned by Chinese conglomerate Tencent since 2015, talked about the new anti-cheat system and said that the new system will eventually make its way to League of Legends and be implemented in future games.
