[2020] Upcoming Vanguard changes

Originally posted by Jefneri

Heya, is there a fix coming for the "Vanguard requiring reboot" -bug? Kinda annoying to safeboot and manually overwrite the files everytime I wanna play. Great game otherwise, and I've been enjoying it a lot.

P. S. Ive tried the method where you remove the drivers and ran as administrator etc. This is the only way I get my game to run. :(

Originally posted by Rakinare

Vanguard is blocking VMWare Virtual Machines from starting. This has impacted a lot of people's workspaces and by now, is already known to VMWare. Is this issue already known to you guys? Will something be done about this?

Originally posted by robinlol

In the latest patch that you pushed everyones FPS was dropped by huge amounts. What exactly in that update made us lose so much? For example when I look into a wall I have around 4-600 fps. Spraying with with the vandal or phantom lowers me to 200 and sometimes even below. In the real world I have around 200~ fps, but spraying guns makes me go even lower causing stutter and extreme screen tearing.

Before the patch was pushed I were above 300 fps in 99% of the times resulting in an extremely smooth gameplay with almost none visible screen tearing.

Why did this happen and why is the next patch going to solve the problems as stated by other people on Riot?

Originally posted by Bloodnoskie

when will there be fps fixes? i get microstutters every time i try retake a site and everyone is shooting and fps is broke in other games :(

Originally posted by bloodkp

will the patch tomorrow include the addition of ranked matchmaking?

Originally posted by otherchedcaisimpostr

any plans to involve third party development for AI anti cheat systems? any in house systems being built? please update us!

Originally posted by OWPD

Awesome write up hopefully, this shutdown all the AHK meme aimbots that people think will be the end of this game lmfao

Originally posted by CodenameOccasus

Is there any way to have vanguard off all of the time besides ingame without uninstalling

Originally posted by numbingdiagram5555

When is the next patch coming out?

Originally posted by ItsGuitarDude

I’m sure this has been answered somewhere else but I can’t find it (If any other redditors can point me to it that would be appreciated). Do you guys have an official fix for when a system reboot doesn’t get rid of the “reboot required” message?

Originally posted by ZeroKiller

I was excited for the update to help me troubleshoot, but still no luck. vgtray.exe seems to run fine, but the vgc service still will not start (even after vanguard reinstall). Manually trying to start the service gives the following error:

Windows could not start the vgc service on the Local Computer.

Error 1: Incorrect function.

Trying to manually start vgc.exe gives the following error:

Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

Please god help me. I also have ticket ID #47827789 open if you need logs.

Edit:

Thanks to Riot's K3o for the fix. One of the earlier fixes I tried was related to those bcdedit commands. I must have fixed the driver issue and forgotten to turn it back off.

If anyone else is having this issue after fixing all driver issues, make sure to run cmd prompt command bcdedit /set NOINTEGRITYCHECKS OFF

Originally posted by fprof

Can false positives be reported somewhere?

Originally posted by Sarg338

by reviewing the product both internally and with external security reviews by industry experts.

Are you guys able to release anything regarding the external audits of your software? Even just the companies?

Originally posted by ZeroKiller

I was excited for the update to help me troubleshoot, but still no luck. vgtray.exe seems to run fine, but the vgc service still will not start (even after vanguard reinstall). Manually trying to start the service gives the following error:

Windows could not start the vgc service on the Local Computer.

Error 1: Incorrect function.

Trying to manually start vgc.exe gives the following error:

Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

Please god help me. I also have ticket ID #47827789 open if you need logs.

Edit:

Thanks to Riot's K3o for the fix. One of the earlier fixes I tried was related to those bcdedit commands. I must have fixed the driver issue and forgotten to turn it back off.

If anyone else is having this issue after fixing all driver issues, make sure to run cmd prompt command bcdedit /set NOINTEGRITYCHECKS OFF

Originally posted by tehrebound

Since you're adding functionality to turn off Vanguard via a system tray icon, will there eventually be functionality added to turn it back on via the same system tray, or is that not possible?

Originally posted by DuasDeColoide

How is the anti-cheat team dealing with all this feedback about vanguard?

Is this something they thought the playerbase would have such a strong opinion on or it caught them by surprise?

Since kernel level anticheat is nothing new in the gamming industry, do they feel that there's some sort of propaganda against their system in particular?

Originally posted by bapplebo

Thanks for this, adds a bit of extra transparency. Unfortunately, I imagine you'd still have those who think that disabling through this way is somehow psyops to trick people into giving information to CCP.

Anyway just wanted to also say your blog had a few articles that were interesting to read through /u/0xNemi.

Originally posted by x4D3r

To be honest i already updated and the fps look the same or even worse, i don't know what u guys did but it sucks, graphics are worse than csgo and we fall to sub 100fps if a gun shoots

Originally posted by EuG_GreeD

Today i've been disconnected from a match like 2 or 3 times, vanguard telling me it has encountered an error (makin me lose the buy phase) but not telling me whats causing it. Is there any way i get to know whats going on?

Originally posted by throwaway138492

Any ETA on either patches?

Originally posted by Smt923

are these logs encrypted? is there any chance we could at least have user readable logs for things that are being blocked and why?

Originally posted by sylvainmirouf

Unrelated question but will we have better or more servers when the game launches? I live in the south of France and I isually get 45-75 ping playing Valorant while I usually get around 20 in other games like CSGO. I have 800mbps fiber, 5 ping locally.

Originally posted by 4bstract_Air

Are frequent ping spikes a common complaint from players or is it most likely just my internet?

Originally posted by robklg159

@ /u/RiotArkem & /u/0xnemi

there's a discussion going on here and I was wondering if perhaps considering the frame by frame seemingly exact shots is there an animation difference in when these guns actually hit?

Originally posted by nivek_c

After the most recent update I noticed that in menu my GPU usage is 100% and hits high temps very rapidly, but when playing my usage is only around 60% and the card sits in the 50 to 60* C range. Is this normal for AMD cards (5700xt)?

Originally posted by pro185

u/RiotArkem u/0xNemi https://imgur.com/a/30RN9s2 Vanguard is disabling boot procedures for my MSI motherboard and causing temperature issues across my GPU and CPU.

Originally posted by necky2

Did you have to develop an aimbot for your game, so you could test the AI?

Originally posted by Kurakuno

/u/0xNemi /u/RiotArkem So those notifications from Vanguard will maybe tell us what is causing the issue for the reboot bug? I've tried everything i found here on Reddit and at some poit I even started a support ticket, which ended with the supporter saying to me that i basically had 2 options, wait for a fix or reset my PC (and I'm not gonna do that). Will this update make it easier for us to play Valorant?

Originally posted by DabSlingz

Odd thing to ask, what time zone are you in? Wondering 16 hours ago when you said patch eta tomorrow if it was Tuesday or Monday for you

Originally posted by KKingler

Could there be a way to hide the system tray icon if I wish? I do not care about it running in the background but a system tray icon would be a little bit annoying. I like keeping them tidy. (also pinging u/RiotArkem if he can answer this!)

Originally posted by OfficialChairleader

Any chance to optimize the game a bit for AMD CPUs? I'm getting anywhere from 70 to 170 fps while people on a comparable or even worse system with an intel chip are getting a steady 200+. This has been an issue for league of Legends as well, it's super well optimized for potatoes that use intel chips but becomes somewhat unplayable even with some of the more recent AMD chips. It would be a bit sad to see Valorant leaves AMD users in the dust as well.

keep up the awesome work!

Originally posted by tr4p

So next patch is confirmed for tomorrow? Also. How long are we talking about before ranked gets turned on. Hours or days?

Originally posted by Auknight33

I've been getting a weird error whenever I boot up my computer with Vanguard on. Just, some random program will boot up for like 5 minutes and keep me from doing anything until it crashes. I found a video of someone else with the same problem. Any ideas? (BTW love you guys, you really stand head and shoulders above almost any other gaming company and I play some of your games specifically because I know and trust the company behind it <3)

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

Originally posted by Eko1123

I know this may seem a bit minor compared to all of the other major bug fixes and patches that you guys are implementing right now, but is there any eta on when we’ll be able to disable profanity filter in chat?

Originally posted by JakeFote

Hello, after this recent patch vanguard is now blocking me from checking my cpu temperatures on both nxzt CAM software and HW Moniter(A highly used software for temperature monitoring). I understand you can just exit vanguard now but that requires you to restart your computer just to play the game. I don’t think the intent of this anti cheat is to block you from monitoring your cpu temps, just some feedback. It is also blocking some features on MSI dragon center as well, which is kind of annoying.

Originally posted by JoNike

I use to be a mastering tech for one of the big publishers. I do not miss it when I read stuff like this. Keep on the good fight!

Originally posted by valorantdatascience

Any chance you can include a saved binary file for semi-replay data. Your timeline capability shown in client is similar to the functionality I'm talking about, just stored in a more easily indigestible format. I am a professional data scientist who happens to love this game. I will do literally all of the format and documentation for free if I know you would use it.

Let me know.

Originally posted by PM_UR_NSFW_ALT

Would it be possible to have a 'do not start on next reboot' option as a middle-ground choice?

Originally posted by BjornHelheim

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.

Originally posted by awera

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.

Originally posted by PM_UR_NSFW_ALT

While 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 amount of cycling a user would put their hardware through (by eliminating reboots, unintentional or unneeded install/removals and related read-write cycles)

Just want to to finish with this note - your already described change is an awesome initiative and i'm happy to have it. I hope my feedback has been constructive and amicable. That is certainly my intent.

Edit: minor grammar edit

Originally posted by sliceoftoasr

/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 😊

Originally posted by THISAINTMYJOB

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.

Originally posted by tr4p

u/RiotArkem where do we report false positives in regards to vanguard? it just flagged my MSI mysic light (for GPU RGB)

Originally posted by [deleted]

Because HWMonitor loads a driver that can be abused by third party applications to read and write physical memory, read and write MSRs, perform IO operations (privileged); all from usermode. It's unsafe to load anyways and they're blocking it because it can be potentially used by hackers to read and write memory for the game.

Originally posted by DingusDong

Well you've hit the nail on the head. Not having perfect security on what essentially a backdoor to potentially hundreds of millions of computers around the world is frankly a little terrifying given who's at the top of the Valorant totem poll.

Quoting what was said in another thread:

It depends how brazen they want to be. Small scale they could gather a whole heap of data. Like where do people look for their news and information would be really handy in prioritising propaganda efforts. Between Tik Tok monitoring phones and Riot monitoring PCs they can probably get a solid sample size for young westerners. On the other end of the spectrum, they could use it for distributed attacks (credential stuffing/DDOS) or to try and hide the origin on a more sophisticated attack (i.e. using compromised user credentials to exfiltrate data). They have administrator access to the machine, they can do with it whatever you could do with it.

Going really tinfoil hat here but it could make for a really secure onion router style network for secret coms. Assuming China doesn't trust TOR (which it shouldn't) they can't deny the inherent benefits of that style of routing. It's effectively untraceable and if it's machines and ports that they compromised it reduces their potential exposure even further. The Tl;Dr of onion routing is that messages you send get broken up and sent to multiple machines before reaching its target. Nothing is perfectly secure, but that is as close as we can really get. Let's say your computer is picked to be one of the middle stops for the data. Assuming you were running wireshark, and looking for data traveling through ports assigned to Valorant (or any other CCP program) you would likely only see a packet full of junk data coming from a random IP, going to a random IP. If there is any P2P data exchange in that game then it would be even harder to find.

/u/0xNemi could we get your thoughts? Are we crazy for having these concerns?

Originally posted by thetorsoboy

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.

Originally posted by 150297

/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?

Originally posted by pro185

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?

Originally posted by vmalhan

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.

Originally posted by IvoAlbino

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...

Originally posted by Cicciopalla001

Can i know the fix too?

Originally posted by Theostru

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.

reg query HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\vgk /v BlockedImage    

Originally posted by [deleted]

Vanguard is blocking System32 .sys drivers on system start up. xtuacpidriver.sys to be exact. Which is Intel tuning software.

Originally posted by Theostru

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.

Originally posted by DrAgus_

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!

Originally posted by SterbaM

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.

Originally posted by znaczki65

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?

Originally posted by pupp3h

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 :)

Originally posted by TheNamesFrosty

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?

Originally posted by the_arksis

While the uninstall option seems to act as a disable for next boot alternative, I feel that it isn't clear that Vanguard will be installed on startup of Valorant. I have hesitated to uninstall Vanguard due to this, thinking that it would require me to redownload Valorant entirely or break the current game state. Maybe providing some more information to the user would be beneficial, such as renaming the option to "Disable until next Valorant startup (requires reboot)"?

Originally posted by SkinnyJeansMcGee

I have this same problem on my laptop + external gpu enclosure. I can't boot with vanguard installed or my computer bluescreens. Is there a fix for this / will there be one soon? Or are eGPU users out of luck?