For clarification: there is a decent chance that the anti-cheat software caught this but hasn't banned the player yet. It is common to send out bans in waves to prevent hackers from being able to quickly test what is and isn't detectable.
Yeah, we do both immediate bans and banwaves depending on the circumstances. We prefer immediate bans but sometimes it's better for us to delay so that the cheat developers don't learn that they're detected for a while.
Fully serious question, if I usually use something like hw monitor to monitor my temps and voltage, and vanguard now blocks this. How am I supposed to tell if vanguard or valorant is actually the cause, if I can’t compare when it’s on and off? So is there a way to actually monitor differences in performance?
You can select "Exit Vanguard" from the system tray or "Uninstall Vanguard" and compare the performance that way.
Vanguard also isn't blocking hardware monitoring software specifically, just some vulnerable drivers that are sometimes used by hardware monitoring tools.
There are tools that work fine (I tested the latest NZXT Cam last night and it looked ok) and tools that don't currently work with Vanguard will likely be updated to replace the blocked driver soon.
After a bunch of trial and error, it appears to be down to iCUE and the cpuz149 driver it uses, however it would be cool if you can fix this issue so that the notification shows this rather than having to spend a couple hours to figure it out :)
I think there is a newer version of the cpuz driver that isn't blocked, I don't know if there's a way to manually update it or whether you'll need to wait for iCUE to update.
If you miss the popup in the future the name of the blocked image will be in your registry here: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vgk under "BlockedImage"
Don't know whether you read my direct message to you or you heard thousands messages of the community on Valorant reddit or Discord, tho good job Arkem.
One question does it only exits the Vanguard Client or also Kernel Driver (when I click Exit Vanguard). One more (I lied that is one only) does it require a reboot after exiting to exit completely?
Thanks for the kind words!
"Exit Vanguard" unloads the driver, so no components of Vanguard should be running afterwards. The Vanguard Client should only be running when the game is running so there's no need to exit it.
Any chance you can say what the issue with Core Temp 1.15.1 is? Vanguard is blocking it from starting, and I get a notification that Vanguard has blocked something, but when I click the notification vanguard does nothing/doesn't give me any details.
I don't know what driver it uses but my guess would be either a vulnerable driver (like MSI Afterburner did) or the driver isn't signed in a way that complies with Microsoft's Secure Boot requirements.
I don’t have any questions, you’ve laid out everything very clearly and understandably. I just wanted to say that I appreciate the amount of transparency we’ve received from all you devs. As someone who as 2,500+ hours of CSGO (like many other VALORANT players) I’m beyond excited to actually see the dev team working with players, and communicating exactly what’s going on. Enjoying the game probably way too much, and I’m very excited for ranked to come out soon. Keep it up VALORANT Dev Team!
Thank you for the kind words!
Hi /u/0xNemi and /u/RiotArkem !
Is there a way to check what was blocked beyond the notification? On boot, the notification disappeared before I could click it, and when I then went to notification center and clicked on it, it went away without presenting any popup or additional information on what was blocked.
Reading this thread, I'm 99% sure it was HWMonitor, but the fact that I have to rely on an ephemeral popup rather than an actual application or even just a log file is pretty frustrating.
The name might be in this registry key, you can take a look: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\vgk\BlockedImage
Any info on the BSOD many people are having due to Vanguard? I'm struggling so hard with the AC I had to uninstall the game otherwise I keep having blue screens...
If it's still happening after yesterday's update can you file a support ticket and provide them the BSOD crash dump? (It'll be C:\Windows\Memory.dmp)
Reading this makes me feel like someone from gaming community answering and not like someone from Dev side. You guys have won my heart. No matter what happens to the game, don't let this side ever wear off. Games will come and go over the years but humbleness and respect for the community will always be the things you will be remembered for.
P.S. I had a question too, forgot to ask 😂. My auto guns keep stop firing randomly while holding down LMB. I have checked outside the game and the LMB works fine. Is it because my laptop is on the lower end side of the spectrum? I have a laptop with i5-7200u with GeForce 940MX and 8GB of RAM.
We've seen a few reports of issues like this and we're investigating. Hopefully we can track it down but I suspect a game bug rather than something unique to your computer. Your computer sounds like it should run the game fine!
What would you recommend I do about this. I am more concerned over temperatures than fan wear so I always have my fans at 100% voltage using MSI command center. If I uninstall command center they immediately go to operating very slowly until my CPU gets hotter than I would like. Has this exploitable driver issue been fixed in recent updates to MSI command center, or am I going to be forced into choosing if I want excessively hot CPU/mobo or not playing valorant?
I haven't tested it but the change log from MSI Afterburner 4.6.2 says
Which sounds promising!
/u/RiotArkem Hello there. Sorry for botherin you but i have a quick quiestion. League of legends has something called League Displays which let's you pick wallpapers from charmpions and skins etc. Have you thought about adding Valorant wallpapers?
I'd love for something like this to exist, not sure if/when it'll happen though!
Yeah I get the same behavior from NZXT Cam, with Vanguard blocking driver cpuz_149x64.sys.
It prevents CPU temp monitoring and fan speed control. I've opened a ticket with NZXT, I guess we'll see if they're responsive towards this or not.
Feel like we'll get stuck in a he said/she said between Riot and the other companies that make these programs.
u/RiotArkem where do we report false positives in regards to vanguard? it just flagged my MSI mysic light (for GPU RGB)
Unfortunately that's not a false positive, that driver has a serious security vulnerability that's commonly used by cheat developers to load their cheats.
I recommend looking to see if there's an update available from MSI or asking them for a fix.
How do you enable the system tray icon though?
Opened valorant to have it download the update but there's still no icon after reboot.
You can run "C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard\vgtray.exe" manually but I'm not sure why it isn't starting for you :(
/u/RiotArkem I'm unable to reinstall the game anymore because it says I need to install the required dependencies, but it won't let me install it. I don't know where else to go with this since I submitted a ticket a week ago and still haven't received a response. Do you have ant clue as to how I can fix this? Thanks 😊
Hopefully support gets back to you soon! (they've been really swamped this last week)
Sometimes this error is due to anti-virus blocking the new Vanguard version (because it hasn't been seen by many people yet), sometimes it's due to a software incompatibility (I know the messaging is bad, sorry). Other times it's a bug on our side.
When support gets back to you hopefully they can help you troubleshoot but if you don't hear from them let me know and if I get some time I'll try and help you out.
Read moreWhile installing and uninstalling is a benign thing, it seems like a repetitive time waste as well as repeated installs not being something i'm in the habit of doing. So that would be my justification.
The use case would be that it doesn't require the install/uninstall. That's (small, but still) a burden on a user to remember to uninstall or whether they did uninstall last time and if they need to restart. The interface could (hopefully) be as simple as a right click on the system tray icon, with a list item of the checked/unchecked variety, to see the status of "[✔️] Load Vanguard on next restart" or "[ ]Load Vanguard on next restart]." That saves time from checking add/remove programs or booting Valorant up.
This would also seem to be in line with what seems to be the intent of the change you've already described - to make Vanguard feel less intrusive and to give the user control. This would further respect a user's time and attention, as well as reduce the a...
Thanks for elaborating!
Out of curiosity was it the pak encryption setting? UE4 dev here and would love to avoid the same issue from happening to my game.
It was from one of our custom in-house security tools (one we use for League of Legends too).
We currently do PAK encryption but only for some files. PAK encryption didn't kill performance during gameplay for us but it did dramatically increase load times and makes patching more awkward.
Hey there, sorry to be bothering. I'm not sure if you're the right person to be asking this but a lot of people (me included) have encountered a bug that prevents them from selecting a resolution. Whatever option the user chooses, the resolution will always bug out and the only fix is to disable the monitor driver in windows device manager. Is this issue being looked at? Can we expect this simple bug to be fixed by launch? Thanks for your time.
There are some display/resolution changes coming in the next game patch (today? tomorrow? something like that), hopefully that helps!
Would it be possible to have a 'do not start on next reboot' option as a middle-ground choice?
This is basically what the uninstall option does. Vanguard won't run on your computer until the next time you want to play. Vanguard is relatively small (approx 16MB) so it reinstalls quickly.
We can look into a "disable for next boot" option if you'd like though. Can you give me an example of the use case so I know how to prioritize the feature request?
Hi Arkem, sorry for replying to a week old comment but Vanguard blocks gdrv.sys on boot and I can't access my computer's fans anymore, which means things could get too hot. Everything was working fine up until today. Any idea how to stop this from happening?
If your worried I definitely recommend uninstalling Vanguard.
gdrv.sys is being used by cheat developers to load cheats and ransomware to take over computers which is why we block it.
The latest version of your fan control software should work without needing the gdrv.sys driver.
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