Valorant Eases Up Anti-Cheat Software. Slightly.

Not too long ago – or maybe it was an incredibly long time ago, it’s hard to gauge these days – Valorant got under fire for having one of the most proactive and aggressive anti-cheating measures in competitive gaming, automatically installing anti-cheat software that would be running non-stop on your PC, monitoring you to ensure you never even think about installing cheat software. Riot Games tried to explain the rationale behind it, and even detailed how harmless it was, but it turns out, people still weren’t very comfortable with it.

So Riot Games opted to take a tiny step back. A baby step back. On Reddit:

Starting today, Vanguard will start showing a system tray icon (after a reboot) while it's running. From there, you'll be able to turn off Vanguard at any time. Turning off Vanguard puts your machine in an untrusted mode and will prevent you from playing VALORANT until you reboot. If you want to keep Vanguard off indefinitely until you play VALORANT (e.g. persisting across multiple reboot sessions), you'll be able to do so more easily now by uninstalling it from the handy dandy system tray. Vanguard will automatically be reinstalled when you launch VALORANT.

So basically, you can turn off the anti-cheat software anytime you want, but then you can’t play the game, and when you turn it back on again you have to restart your PC so you can’t sneak any cheating software into the game beforehand.

It’s certainly better that Riot Games has made it easier to turn that stuff off, since doing it beforehand would require either a strong understanding of computers or just straight-up uninstalling the game, but it’s still a pretty invasive system that relies heavily on your ability to trust Riot Games.

But with how popular this game seems to be, I think most people will be willing to make that leap of faith.