Since Riot Games revealed that Valorant is going to use a new anti-cheat system a lot of players have been concerned. Vanguard is a security system that runs a driver at system startup, and that has raised all kinds of alarms among the players that think that the program could gather information from their computers or slow down their systems. The upcoming shooter from League of Legends creators will undoubtedly need some kind of security measures to prevent cheaters to turn the game into a real mess. That is something that could affect both the development process and the future of the game. The genre is already packed of good games and allowing cheaters to roam freely could drive players away from Valorant very soon. After all, it's quite frustrating to progress in a competitive game when you have to face people that use cheats.
One of Valorant's developers have addressed all those concerns by explaining the reasons behind the use of this kind of software, claiming that it does not collect or send any information about your computer back to them and that
it doesn't scan anything unless the game is running.
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).
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.
You can choose to believe him or not, but in the case of Valorant it's quite clear that if you try to cheat in the game you will probably get banned as soon as you are discovered.
In an attempt to demonstrate that the Vanguard anti-cheat software will be failproof when Valorant launches, Riot Games is offering a hefty amount of money to those that can find vulnerabilities in the system. If you manage to demonstrate practical exploits leveraging the Vanguard kernel driver with a high-quality report you can earn up to $100,000 as a reward. You can find more info on the matter on this address if you are interested.
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