You may not want to be honest but A GDPR request will force you to hand over everything it collects.
The way your handling this is scummy and honestly I’ve 100% lost interest in the game over this.
I'm sorry to hear that, you might be interested in our latest article about the security and privacy of Vanguard: https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/a-message-about-vanguard-from-our-security-privacy-teams
Hey Arkem, would I be banned for injecting cheats into another game while not playing valorant or having it running? I play on HvH servers in csgo.
While I don't think you should be cheating at other games (well other multiplayer games) we won't ban you for things you do outside Valorant. In some cases the game might not run if generic cheating tools are open but we don't want to ban players unless they are actually cheating.
I haven't installed the game due to concerns over the anti-cheat. (And it doesn't help that it won't run on a vm)
I have two questions:
1) Are you planning to create an option to uninstall it when one installs Valorant? (Talking about Vanguard, I think since it only supports one game it should go away when you remove said game)
2) I've had a shitty experience with Halo Master Chief coming with EAC without letting me know in advance during download or during installation. Does your download / install process make it clear to the players that Valorant is bundled with extra software that also has a kernel driver? As a fellow gamer I imagine you also don't miss the good 'ol StarForce days.
Thanks for the time you took reading and possibly replying to someone that isn't a customer.
Hi, thanks for the questions!
1) We designed Vanguard for multiple games so the thought was that it should be as independent as possible which is why it has its own entry in Add/Remove Programs and doesn't uninstall with the game. We're changing this and soon uninstalling the game will uninstall Vanguard too (or at least ask about it).
2) It wasn't ready for the first week of closed beta but we have a notification pop-up that says that Vanguard is being downloaded/installed in the patcher now. In an upcoming version the pop-up will be expanded to include a link to an article with more details.
u/RiotArkem Same Issue. i got banned from multiply EAC game yesterday after i installed Valorant. this is some serious crap because EAC says that i used "Third Party Software" but i literally didnt got anything like that before playing Valorant
We talk to EAC fairly often, I'll check in with them to see if there're any compatibility issues.
I use AHK a lot for work. Will it instantly ban or tell you to close AHK?
Right now we don't ban for just using AHK, if we decided that AHK isn't allowed we would likely tell you to close it rather than ban your account.
when is your article coming out? last you told me it was tuesday?
Here's my Fog of War article: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-valorants-fog-war
Can you provide even striped versions of those audits and third party names that did them?
One reason we haven't done something like this is that we paid those firms for their expertise and not their reputations.
When we engaged them we didn't think we'd ever mention them or the services they provided us. These kinds of reviews are a routine part of releasing a new product and not at all something we were expecting to talk about.
Since there's been a lot of interest (and concern) over the security of Vanguard I thought it'd be reassuring to mention the reviews to show that we understand the risks and have a process that includes responsible steps for improving the security of our products. Maybe it was a mistake to mention them at all? I don't know.
could you please really reconsider the 24/7 on startup part of the AC?
it's been negatively impacting other games i play, and having to restart my pc just for a game makes me not want to play it.
also if you wanna be safer when it comes to competitive play why not request to connect a phone number for it like you guys did with league's Clash?
Would you be willing to work with me to troubleshoot? There's some logs you could send me that might help us get to the bottom of your issues. If so please send me a DM.
Not the other commenter, but please, don't have a "our anticheat is always right" attitude with your product.
I understand that it's difficult with so many cheaters around to try to judge individual cases, and trust that your system is flawless, but some of us were badly burned by an anticheat that detected a false positive, and for an avid gamer that's one of the worst things that can happen to them. It's unjust, there is no recourse, you have no way to fix it and usually you don't even why specifically you were banned; perhaps what software got you flagged so that you can avoid it in the future.
We're definitely not perfect and we're willing to review punishments we give out to look for false positives. We're happy to overturn bans if we have made a mistake.
but can you please clarify in short, crisp and clear english why on earth it is necessary to have this thing run all the time? There's a reason why (almost) noone else has a anti cheat system like this.
At the risk of making you dismiss me as a "lost customer", this is the primary reason why I won't be playing this game (even though I'd love to try it!).
If the driver component loads as the game starts the computer's environment could already be in a compromised state. If a cheat was launched before the game was launched it could have already made changes to the system that would make it easy to bypass our cheat detection scans.
The driver component exists so that when the rest of the anti-cheat system starts up we can have some guarantee that the results it returns are correct and that cheats have not already gained the permissions they need to tamper with the game.
(In regards to your other comment, the game will refuse to initialize if the Vanguard driver wasn't started at boot. So you can remove Vanguard whenever you like but until it's reinstalled the game won't work)
You've likely already answered this but does Vanguard remain if Valorant is uninstalled? If so, why does it remain and continue to run?
Here's a guide on how to uninstall Vanguard: https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360044648213-Uninstalling-Riot-Vanguard
We didn't automatically uninstall Vanguard when Valorant is uninstalled because they are separate products and Vanguard can be used by multiple games.
In hindsight this was a mistake and we're looking into changing this behavior so that Vanguard is uninstalled when Valorant is uninstalled.
- How would I check to make sure even uninstalling vanguard has not left any marks on my system?
this is my exact question too. /u/RiotArkem any help? i wanna play but this makes me nervous
All Vanguard related files are in C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard here's a guide to how to uninstall it (including a manual removal guide): https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360044648213-Uninstalling-Riot-Vanguard
If you want to help build trust, explain how the anti-cheat works more clearly. All I get on install is a text box that says an anti-cheat is installing. Nothing about the fact that it's an always-on anti-cheat.
In the next patcher update (probably next week) we'll be changing that notification to include a link to an article with more details on how the system works. Thanks for the feedback!
Arkem, I see a lot of folks fear mongering about how this is "unprecedented" access to give for an anti-cheat. Can you speak to this at all? I find it hard to believe that this level of access (ring 0) isn't utilized by Battleye or EAC. I understand your driver is loaded on startup and that's what allows it to detect things those can't - but my understanding is those more or less all operate with the same level of permissions as Vanguard. I'm in favor of this and just trying to best understand it.
Many anti-cheat systems use kernel drivers, most of them don't talk about it as much as we do.
As far as I understand it both Battleye and EAC both use kernel drivers as part of their anti-cheat protection.
"I'm sorry you feel that way"
What a cop-out, I'd rather deal with the odd cheater inside a reactionary based anti-cheat than this horseshit right here. Are you trying to tell me all Riot employees have this installed on their work PCs? I bet there's an employee version of Vanguard that doesn't open your machine so you guys can protect your assets while putting the rest of us at risk.
Of course not, every computer that's currently playing VALORANT has Vanguard installed including Riot employees' personal and work computers.
I replied a few dozen times in a thread on Sunday, here's a link to the most in depth comment I wrote: https://old.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_starts_upon_computer_boot/fn6yqbe/
We're definitely not using the same servers as League of Legends but we're part of the same Riot Direct network. If you submit a support ticket with your ISP and location we can look into it to see if there's something wrong on our end.
Great, I appreciate the quick support.
This kind of info needs to be in the installer or on the download page. Crazy that I had to put in so much effort to get this information.
I’m sure a lot of players would feel more comfortable with an official response on this matter. Please consider it.
Thanks!
We have articles about it on our support site and briefly mention it on the game download page but we're also adding a notification during the patching process to make it clearer (I think this notification will come out today but I'm not 100%) eventually the notification will also link to our support articles.
Any word on a fix for the reports about negative performance in other games? I experienced this quite a bit myself over the weekend after installing and it's flat our ruining other games for me. I can't see people keeping this installed if these issued don't get addressed pretty quickly
If you submit a support ticket we can try and troubleshoot it for you and if we find an issue your help will make it much more likely we can fix it for everyone.
for some reason I am unable to uninstall this Vanguard program. I went through all the steps given on the support page, and nothing has removed this program. I am given a message to terminate the program, but it never goes away. Wtf ... is this
What happens when you type:
"sc delete vgc" and "sc delete vgk"
into an administrator command prompt?
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