Valorant’s intrusive anti-cheat system can now be disabled…from the taskbar

Riot Games has made it very clear that they’re not okay with cheating. Why would they be? Think of all the most successful competitive first-person shooters over the past few years and you’ll be hard-pressed to think of one that wasn’t rife with cheaters at some point. Hackers are a large part of why a community often migrates away from a game so a developer doing everything in their power to prevent it from happening is to be expected. Yet people have been less than impressed with Riot’s approach to cheating in Valorant as the software they’ve tasked with flagging hackers is more than a little intrusive.

The company’s Vanguard system, which is installed the same time a player installs Valorant, operates a the kernel drive level. Which is just the fancy way of saying that the thing starts up when you boot up your PC and is always running in the background.

Which is more than a little spooky, right? Ever since a Reddit user spotted how Vanguard was operating, the Valorant community has been more than concerned about anti-cheat software that has permissions just under the system’s admin. To smooth thing’s over with the community, Riot has now added Vanguard to the Window’s system tray, meaning users can elect to disable it when they boot up their PCs. They can even go one step further and uninstall the program entirely but if you want to play Valorant you’ll have to reinstall the anti-cheat software and reboot your system. Oh, and if you disable Vanguard you’ll need to reboot your PC so that it can reactivate before playing Valorant. Time to invest in an SSD!

Riot has made it very clear that the Vanguard software is safe for all users and does not share private information with anyone. Unless you’re a hacker, but even then it’s not sending your physical address out to some guy at Riot, sitting in a dark corner, breathing heavily. Still, I’m not sure how I’d feel having third-party software with more permissions than nearly any other program on my PC just casually hanging out even when it’s not in use. Loitering is a crime, even on my hard drive.

Last Updated: April 29, 2020