Riot makes some VALORANT anti-cheat changes

Riot Games has always paid attention to cheating in their games, and their player base hasn’t had too much to complain about, until two weeks ago. Players discovered that Vanguard, Riots anti-cheat software autoruns whenever you start up your system and keeps on running.

This, coupled with the fact that Vanguard has administrator privileges, meant systems could be left vulnerable to malicious attacks. Unlike other anti-cheat software that run only when their game is launched, Vanguard prevented players from running cheats before the game starts, which has been known to avoid anti-cheat measures.

Riot has now had a rethink, changing how Vanguard operates in some ways. Most importantly, it will no longer run in the background always as players can now disable it whenever they like, so long as VALORANT isn’t running. Additionally, if deleted, Vanguard will automatically reinstall itself the next time you try to run the game.

In their Reddit post, Riot states that they’ve been able to address many performance issues players have reported regarding Vanguard, and intend to continue doing so. The anti-cheat can be turned off via the system tray icon, but this puts the computer in an untrusted mode that prevents VALORANT from being played until a system reboot.

So Vanguard will still boot up with player’s computers, but now they have control over when it runs.