Valorant Devs Talk About Their Anti-Cheat Tools

This week’s dev blog post from the team behind Valorant talks about the development and implementation of the anti-cheat system.

The current anti-cheat system in Valorant consists of a kernel mode driver that loads during the boot system. This means that those who have downloaded Valorant will have the Vanguard system running in the background, even when not playing the game. It is possible to disable the Vanguard, but it will have to be turned back on in order to play.

The system was designed to weed out the cheaters using an AI that would investigate and monitor players, with the final decision coming from the anti-cheat team.

Following the massive wave of player bans issues recently, Paul Chamberlain, Valorant’s anti-cheat lead, comments in the blog post on how the team is listening to feedback.

"We’ve heard feedback from players that it felt like Vanguard was being overbearing in its approach to security so we’re taking another approach. As of last week, Vanguard’s compatibility with vulnerable software packages has been expanded. While a small number of drivers are still blocked, from now on almost all of the software that Vanguard was previously blocking will work properly on Vanguard protected computers.

In the future we’re going to prefer non-invasive solutions to security issues where possible, finding ways for Vanguard, Valorant and that one weird RGB driver to coexist. If we can’t find a way for them to all work together, we’ll disable the game rather than disable your other software. Only in the most egregious cases will we block any software from running on your computer.

We’re continuing to improve Vanguard and we need your feedback to make good decisions. So please let us know how you feel about our anti-cheat efforts and we’ll do our best to keep everyone (except cheaters) happy," comments Chamberlain.

The blog post also touches on the element of peeker’s advantage and how ranked/competitive play will work going forward.

Valorant is set to officially launch this Summer on PC.