Riot Games Addresses Concerns Over Valorant’s Anti-Cheat System
Riot Games’ new FPS game, VALORANT, gained attention for its advanced anti-cheat system that prioritizes competitive integrity.
Recently, players discovered that Riot’s Vanguard anti-cheat includes a kernel-mode driver that starts running as soon as you boot up your PC. In fact, you need to restart your PC to launch the game for the first time. This topic became a hot discussion within the community, leading Riot to respond.
“We’ve previously discussed Vanguard, but there have been increasing conversations about its kernel mode driver in the past week,” stated Riot’s anti-cheat team in a new blog post. “The main concerns we have heard are about the driver’s security and your privacy. Our colleague, Paul ‘Riot Arkem’ Chamberlain, has been addressing questions to the best of his ability. However, as a group of Rioters who prioritize security and privacy, we wanted to provide additional insight into how Vanguard was created with these aspects in mind.”
Essentially, Vanguard cannot function in user-only mode as it would compromise the capabilities of the anti-cheat software. Nevertheless, Riot assures users that no personal information is being collected.
“Vanguard does not collect or process any personal information beyond what the current League of Legends anti-cheat solution does,” Riot confirmed. “Riot only gathers the necessary information to maintain a high level of integrity in the game. The collected game data is used for game operations and integrity-related services.”
Riot emphasizes that its security and data privacy teams have closely coordinated throughout the development of Vanguard. The developer holds the belief that if it was not confident in maintaining player privacy and security, it would not have released the software.
“We would never release something that we cannot stand behind from a player-trust perspective (not that we think Riot would ever try),” Riot stated. “Players have the right to question and challenge us, but we want to make it clear that we deeply care about player trust and privacy. We are players just like you, and we would never install programs on our own computers that we didn’t fully trust. Please continue to hold us accountable for protecting the competitive integrity of the games and your personal privacy.”
VALORANT is currently in closed beta and is expected to have an official release this summer.