Valorant Dev Tracker

On the crosshair improvements list. Will sort it out!

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

We haven't yet incorporated a lot of our teamwork/communication features into the tutorial, so I'll provide a quick overview of how the "threat indicators" work.

How do they work?

When a teammate dies, a snapshot is taken of the enemy locations visible to that recently deceased player. All remaining living allies get "threat indicators" that point to those last known enemy locations - the closer the location to the viewer, the bigger the indicator. The positions being indicated are not updated as the enemy moves, so it's only reliable information for a few moments, and it's not very precise.

Why are they in the game?

In a perfect world, when an ally dies they promptly share a specific enemy location via voice chat. The rest of your team, simply by listening, can absorb this new info and adjust their tactics to react to the changing game state. These sorts of callouts are critical to making decisions about wh...

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

Please, elaborate.

We have a handful of changes in the works related to the clarity of health and ammo status, and the minimap.

If you're having issues finding yourself on the minimap, try turning "Keep Player Centered = On" so the map always positions with you at the center. The trade-off if that you'll lose full map visibility (unless you zoom out a lot), but it might help with reading it quickly.

We'll be looking at everyone's settings to see what players are changing to most frequently, and we'll adjust the defaults where it makes sense.

We're adding an option to keep the map oriented the same (on the side) all the time, or change the fixed orientation so that your starting side is on the bottom (attacker vs. defender).

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.

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?

Thanks Danker! I'm pretty excited :)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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