Valorant Anti-Cheat Program Will Feature A Run-At-Boot Driver Says Riot Games

Anti-cheat programs have helped cut back on the number of hackers and cheaters in various games. Most gamers, however, are very hesitant about having anti-cheat processes that starts running in the background as soon as they startup your system. Apparently, Riot Games’ upcoming shooter Valorant will employ exactly that kind of anti-cheat system.

According to a recent dev post on Reddit, Valorant’s anti-cheat program, called Vanguard, will run a driver component on system startup that will not scan anything unless the game is running. The dev also assures players that the component doesn’t communicate with their servers, will use as few system resources as possible, and can be manually removed through Add/Remove Programs at any time.

“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.”

We think this is an important tool in our fight against cheaters,” adds the dev, “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.”

Check out official gameplay footage from the game in the Closed Beta launch trailer below.