Riot is making changes to the controversial Valorant anti-cheat

Valorant has been wildly successful since it launched into closed beta. It broke viewership records on its first day in beta and has been sitting pretty at the top of Twitch ever since. That’s, of course, largely because viewers are eager for Twitch drops to get into the closed beta. But the one thing that has marred the pristine image of Valorant is the Vanguard anti-cheat. Players have complained about the feature for a while now. Riot Games has consistently defended its security system, but after all that outcry, the team has finally decided to make some changes to it.

A member of the Valorant team took to Reddit to create a post detailing the planned changes. The major change will be to make the Vanguard anti-cheat more visible to players, so they will have more control over it. This will be done by showing a Vanguard icon in your system tray.

You’ll be able to control the Vanguard anti-cheat from the system tray.

The anti-cheat being visible in your system tray means you will be able to turn it off at any time. This will prevent it from using processing power or blocking other software. However, you will not be able to play Valorant unless it is active. So, you will need to reboot your system to reenable the anti-cheat before you can play. If you have uninstalled it, which you can do, it will automatically reinstall when you launch Valorant.

Running interference

The changes to the anti-cheat will cause it to notify you if it blocks or modifies anything on your system. Riot is trying very hard to minimize the amount of software this will happen with and assures players that most of them will never encounter an issue. If you do encounter a rare frustrating problem, just remember that all of this is to reduce the number of cheaters in Valorant.

You will be notified if Vanguard blocks something on your PC.

The Vanguard anti-cheat is another barrier to entry that hackers need to overcome. It makes it so only the most determined cheaters will be able to exploit the game. And that gives the Valorant team the best chance to uncover those who do manage to cheat. Riot argues that it takes competitive integrity seriously, and that means implementing cutting-edge systems that, unfortunately, require a few more hoops for players to jump through. Many would say it’s worth it.

The post wraps up by assuring players that Riot isn’t selling their data to China. It also encourages players who do run into issues with the system to create a support ticket.