RiotArkem

As a meta note about the timing of this article, I turned in my draft of this piece on April 23rd.

I probably would have worded it differently if I wrote it today!

We're working on ways to make the experience better. Our current notification pop-ups aren't as good as they could be and we're looking for ways to give you more control over how Vanguard works.

We're happy to do anything we can to make this smoother for everyone as long as it doesn't give an opening for cheaters.

TL;DR: Expect improvements before launch.

I recommend submitting a support ticket because something is wrong here. Unless your MMR is very high (or very low) you should be playing on Chicago servers almost all of the time.

It's a good idea, I've gone ahead and swapped the word "Hacker" for "Cheater". It should be in the next patch. If I get some free time I'll think about better ways to write this screen.

Ironically this screen was meant to be a placeholder but I didn't get the chance to replace it before beta and now that it's out there it's kind of grown on me.

We had to choose between delaying the beta or starting without bans. It wasn't just bans though there have been a lot of areas where we weren't quite ready but I guess that's why it's a beta.

Yeah this sucked, we screwed up here.

The last 24 hours were rough for us because we've been in the process of migrating to a new ban system. Previously we had a temp-system that removed beta access (like revoking your beta drop) but as of today we have real bans.

During the migration some of our bans weren't sticking but now we should be good to go. These new real bans will also unlock some more sophisticated banning options for us (including expanding our use of hardware bans).

If you exit Vanguard from the system tray you'll get this effect. The drivers will be able to load but Valorant won't be playable until a reboot. Alternatively you can uninstall Vanguard from the system tray and it will be gone completely until the next time you want to play Valorant.

Vanguard blocks drivers with known security vulnerabilities (usually privilege escalation via arbitrary memory writes) that allow cheat developers to load their cheats into the kernel without approval from Microsoft.

It's hard to know which hardware software monitoring tools will be blocked because many of them repackage other company's drivers. We don't block software packages specifically only the drivers they distribute.

If software that you use is blocked please check with the vendor to see if an update is available and if no update is available please contact them and ask them to fix their vulnerable drivers.

We've talked about it and agree that it could be useful but it's not high on our to-do list.

In our testing players with high ping are a pretty high disadvantage even when peeking. We've tried to make the game in a way that having a bad network connection only makes things worse for you and does not give you any advantages.

Thanks for the feedback!

We think that showing your character portrait made it harder for players to read the minimap and that it was useless information since you should know what agent you're playing without needing to see the portrait.

There's a good chance that we change how this looks further to improve clarity more. I personally don't like how big the player indicator is and I'd be surprised if I was the only one.

Sorry, we want the game to have as consistent a look as possible for all the people playing.

We'll try and optimize the game further to help you run it but we're unlikely to implement any graphics options that drastically change how the game looks.

Here's a simple but unsatisfying answer for you: It's not detected yet because I haven't made the detection yet. I haven't made the detection yet because this problem hasn't been my top priority.

The reason why Vanguard doesn't prevent this is because technically this is how graphics drivers are meant to work. It's a legitimate feature but not one we want to support on Valorant. Vanguard proactively protects against cheats that plan to modify the game rather than stuff like this.

Instead of making the detection I'd rather fix the underlying issue in game. If this becomes more popular or a fix will take longer than I'd like then I'll make a detection and ban all the people.

Anyone using this for competitive advantage should know that they can be banned for it even if I have to do it manually without an automated detection.

Our anti-cheat ops team does a more sophisticated version of this to keep track of the cheats available on the market. We generally find that the cheats that you can find from Google are low quality or fake but we keep an eye on them anyway.

I would love more account verification and security options. We have people working on it but I'm not sure what the current ETA is.

We do try and focus our efforts on cheat developers, even taking them to court sometimes: ...

I haven't been a fan of "cheater island" in the past because I always figured that cheaters would quickly figure that they've been flagged (different matchmaking queue time, different quality of matches).

It might be worthwhile if the quarantine time is short enough, for example if banwaves were coming every 12 hours, then maybe flagging the accounts for some sort of soft ban immediately would reduce the damage they do but not give cheat developers much of a head start.

Maybe I'm letting the perfect be the enemy of the good but I'd rather try to get to a world where we were banning all cheaters immediately on detection (which is only partially true today).

We're looking into performance at the moment. My change improved performance for some players but there are some other performance issues that we're investigating.

I don't think we'll ever be "done" with looking for optimizations though! We're hoping to always be making the game perform better.

Vanguard has always been running while the game has been closed but we thought it would be better to give you a tray icon so you can see that it's running and exit it/uninstall if you like.

Vanguard has a component that runs from system startup to ensure that when the game (and the rest of the anti-cheat) starts the system is in a known protected state. This makes it harder for cheats to be loaded into the system in a way that we couldn't detect.

Yeah, I'm working with nvidia to figure out the best way to stop this kind of thing.

Definitely don't recommend people do this, like /u/Tsanummy says it's not hard to detect.