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RiotArkem

RiotArkem



12 Apr

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Comment

Originally posted by BLlZER

TL;DR Yes we run a driver at system startup, it doesn't scan anything (unless the game is running), it's designed to take up as few system resources as possible and it doesn't communicate to our servers. You can remove it at anytime.

Yeah guys lets all trust a company to have a program on our PC's turned on all the time. We all know companies always do whats best for us and not their shareholders. Never in the history of mankind we consumers were f**ked by companies. Yeah guys it's fine let them have acess to your computer ALL THE TIME even when the game IS NOT running...

What could go wrong? I want to thank you Arkem for clarifying this, and convince me and hopeful others to not install this spyware of a game.

I'm sorry to hear that we haven't earned your trust. Maybe our actions will convince you in the future.

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Originally posted by chazragg

i take it this will be the same anti-cheat that is planned to be implanted to the league client in the near future ?

League of Legends might one day adopt Riot Vanguard as its anti-cheat system but there's no timeline for it.

The article about it was a little confusing because we posted it on the League website (because there was no Valorant website yet) and we didn't want to suggest that Valorant was about to release.

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Originally posted by xRobert1016x

Hey Arkem, could you possibly add support for shadow pc? Some of my friends have bad computers but the anti cheat detects the computer as a virtual machine and they are forced to play on their bad computer.

Sorry, we have no plans to support streaming services like Shadow at this time. We might reconsider in the future if we can find a way to do so without weakening our anti-cheat systems.

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Originally posted by Der_Hausmeisterr

That's good to hear but what is your exact position in the company? Not to be rude but I hope you have some meaningfull say in the final decision.

I'm definitely not the CEO or anything but I'm well placed to make a promise about no cryptocurrency mining in our game.

Currently I'm the anti-cheat lead for VALORANT. On behalf of Joe and Anna (the game leads) I oversee the product and tech decisions relating to security issues for the game. Previously I was the tech lead for the company's central anti-cheat technology team (the Vanguard team basically).

I've been at Riot for more than 6 years now so I'm fairly well integrated into the technical organization, I'm confident that no official decision to add a cryptominer or any similar tech to the game would be possible without me hearing about it and having a chance to stop it. Not that I ever think it'd come to that!

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Originally posted by [deleted]

[removed]

I'm sorry to hear that, I hope that over time we'll be able to earn your trust.

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Originally posted by liamlb663

Any comment on the cheating programs that have already popped up

It sucks, we're working on it. More details here: https://old.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_starts_upon_computer_boot/fn7bqh2/

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Originally posted by pvpproject

May I ask about accessibility software? I create custom AHK scripts for clients with limited use of their hands (such as RSI, missing fingers, etc), often times these scripts are paired with adaptive controllers.

Most of the scripts I make allow users to toggle things that the game often doesnt allow them too, or presses multiple buttons at once (sometime with a timings between them). For example in Valorant I've had a request to make a toggle run / walk key. All these scripts are aimed at making the users time spent playing more comfortable.

If it's a multiplayer PvP game I aim to get the go ahead from the devs before I start building things for people, and in the past there has been fair concern and pushback from some companies because of the "slippery slope" that these type of things can bring. On the other hand, some companies have even gone as far as to replicate the functionality of our accessibility software straight into their game, specifically ArenaNet bui...

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At the moment we are ok with people using programs like AHK, we can't provide support for them but we will also not actively block them or ban people for running it.

If AHK becomes something that is being abused we may need to restrict it, ideally feature by feature but possibly blocking the whole program. In that case we would make sure we announced the policy change ahead of taking any actions.

I'd hope we'd also be able to work with the community to find alternatives means to improve the game's accessibility. Long term it would be great if we had the needed tools in game for players but even absent that we'd try to provide some accomodation.

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Originally posted by Aleriic

I don't like that it is that way. I have never cheated but I personally think there should be some option to turn it off. I am playing mutliple games and I still fear that the 20 thousand different anti cheat systems will interfere with each other and might get me banned somewhere else. Isn't it possible to implement a feature that it is turned off and if you wanna start the game, then you have to restart to turn it on AND you have a display somewhere that it's currently running? No one wants cheaters and I am all with you in the fight, I still don't want to get banned because let's say XIGNCODE3 from Black Desert Online detects Vanguard as Anti-cheat or vise versa. Cheating is a big issue especially in F2P games, I would even pay 15€ for a Premium Status that prioritizes matching me with other premium people (I think CS:GO had a similiar system).

We're trying to play as nicely with other software as possible, if we find incompatibilities fix them as soon as possible.

You can basically do what you're suggesting (except for the display part) by uninstalling Vanguard when you're not playing. You can uninstall it from Add/Remove programs.

For the display part there might be a quick script someone could write that displays a message on the screen if vgk.sys is loaded. Maybe someone could use something like RainMeter to make a custom desktop text label?

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Originally posted by danker

Correct. It’s Tuesday. :)

Thanks Danker! I'm pretty excited :)

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Originally posted by striker890

Aren't cheats usually loading as an unsigned driver? Can't you make a unsigned version, that only loads if the ms checking is disabled?

Definitely! We try to detect when driver signing is disabled and prevent the game from running.

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Originally posted by [deleted]

[deleted]

We are confident that we're complying with European privacy regulations, we take our obligations to player's privacy seriously.

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Originally posted by Gettrolledsteve

Then could you do that but create a bunch of decoy drivers whitelisted by riot and shuffles them every update? having the cheat makers going troughs a 1000 of fake drivers in order to find the working one? Btw thanks for the answer!

That's a fun idea, I'm not sure if Microsoft would appreciate us doing that though :)

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Originally posted by [deleted]

[deleted]

We take our responsibility as software developers seriously and we'll try to give you as many assurances as we can that this software is safe and secure. We're not perfect but we're putting a lot of effort into to trying to keep players safe.

At some point each player needs to decide whether or not they want to trust any piece of software with their computer. If you don't trust Riot enough to install VALORANT and Vanguard on your computer I'll understand but I hope we can change your mind one day.

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Originally posted by jronehfijfnlwpzkfnir

You should open source this driver for extra piece of mind on our part

I'd love to but we're worried that releasing the source code would make it easier to bypass. I know it sounds a little "security by obscurity" but when talking about client based anti-cheat efforts there're always some elements of that.

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Originally posted by GamerGypps

So effectively you need the driver running 24/7 if you want to play the game. Or uninstall and re-install plus reboot your PC every time you want to play ?

Yes, to play the game you need to have the anti-cheat system installed and initialized at boot. You can uninstall it anytime you like but you will need to reinstall it and reboot before playing.

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Originally posted by MolestingSandwich

As much as I want to believe this line "The Vanguard driver does not collect or send any information about your computer back to us." it gets proven time and time again this is false. Doesn't exactly help your case being a Tencent company and all as well.

I get it, we'll have to earn your trust!

Feel free to monitor what we're doing and call us out if you see something fishy.

Valorant will temporarily ban cheaters computers from running the game

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Originally posted by valorantvfio

Hi, I just found this.

I prefer my VM setup with GPU Passthrough much more than dual booting. So far I invested too much time in getting the Vanguard service to stop crashing, so I will setup a dual boot configuration.

However, if you guys decide to allow VMs, how could I find about it? Is there a tech blog or something I can subscribe to?

We have a tech blog: https://technology.riotgames.com/ (I have an article coming out here this week)

For something as directly relevant to the game as VM support we'd likely mention it in our patch notes and/or put it in an article on the game site.

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Originally posted by IkeKap

This is probably a dumb question but are you planning to continue these security practices as the code is updated?

Definitely, security is a process, we can't just say "we did security and now we don't need to think about it anymore". As we make code changes we know that new risks could be introduced and our previous reviews become less applicable.

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Originally posted by Redztar

And this is one of - if not the most important part.

I was so sorry to hear that someone already beat the anti cheat somehow, or "almost".

Can you give some insight into what they did our what happened unless I missed a post or article?

Again thank you for your time and this lovely game! Also if you stumble over my "CB button" so smash it for me thx! :D

The TL;DR version is that we launched our anti-cheat in a more passive mode to begin with in the hopes of reducing the chance of launch week issues. It was also hoped that this soft start would let us observe how cheaters would attack the current system without us fully tipping our hands.

To be honest in hindsight I would have tried to take a different approach because cheaters made progress much more quickly than I expected. The week or two or ramp up time I was hoping for was actually only a few days and so if I could do it again I would have recommended going hard right out of the gate.

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Originally posted by bapplebo

Out of curiosity, if I use something like a PiHole to block outgoing DNS while the game isn't running, what are the consequences of that?

None it'll work fine, we don't have any network connectivity requirements unless the game is running.