Riot shares more details about VALORANT’S always-on anti-cheat

One of the big selling points of Riot Games’ new FPS VALORANT was its state of the art anti-cheat, making a game where competitive integrity is paramount.

Earlier in the week, players took notice that a kernel-mode driver from Riot’s Vanguard anti-cheat is running from the moment you boot up your PC. In fact, you have to restart your PC to even boot up the game for the first time. It became a hot topic in the community and Riot has decided to address it.

“We’ve discussed Vanguard in the past, but over the last week there’s been a lot of conversation about Vanguard and its kernel mode driver,” said some of Riot’s top anti-cheat minds in a new blog post. “The biggest concerns we’re hearing are about the security of the driver and your privacy. Our buddy Paul ‘Riot Arkem’ Chamberlain has been addressing questions where he can, but as a group of the most unapologetically paranoid Rioters, we wanted to give Riot Arkem a little backup and give you some added insight into how Vanguard was built with security and privacy at its heart.”

Basically, Vanguard can’t be run in user-only mode or the anti-cheat software’s capablities would be compromised. That said, Riot promises that there’s no personal information being collected.

“Vanguard does not collect or process any personal information beyond what the current League of Legends anti-cheat solution does,” Riot said. “Riot does not want to know more about you or your machine than what is necessary to maintain high integrity in your game. The game data we collect is used for the operation of the game and integrity-related services such as Packman and Vanguard.”

Riot says that its security and data privacy teams have been coordinating closely at every stage of Vanguard’s development. The developer said it wouldn’t ship anything if it wasn’t confident that it treated “player privacy and security with the extreme seriousness they deserve.”

“We’d never let Riot ship something we couldn’t stand behind from a player-trust perspective (not that we think Riot would ever try),” Riot said. “Players have every right to question and challenge us, but let’s be clear—we wouldn’t work here if we didn’t deeply care about player trust and privacy and believe that Riot feels the same way. We’re players just like you, and we wouldn’t install programs on our computer that we didn’t have the utmost confidence in. Please keep holding us accountable for protecting both the competitive integrity of your games and your personal privacy.”

VALORANT is now in closed beta and is set to be officially released this summer.