Riot Games is adapting the Vanguard anti-cheat system for the VALORANT console version.
As part of Riot Games’ plans to bring VALORANT to PS5 and Xbox, the developer has revealed it’s adapting its in-house anti-cheat system, Vanguard, to maintain the tactical FPS’ competitive integrity on consoles.
The Importance of Vanguard in Ensuring a Cheating-Free Gaming Environment
Vanguard is Riot Games’ custom anti-cheat software for VALORANT—and, since April, League of Legends, too. Since its adoption in 2020, Vanguard has played an important role in detecting and combating cheating, allowing VALORANT to remain generally free of wrongdoing.
Riot is committed to competitive integrity
“We take competitive integrity seriously, and we are fully committed to offering a best-in-class technological experience for FPS players across all platforms,” the game’s production director, Arnar Gylfason, told ESN.GG. Gylfason also stated that Riot is trying to adapt “many” of Vanguard’s features for VALORANT’s console version, including the identification of anomalous input devices.
Similarities and Differences in Anti-Cheat Systems
Other anti-cheat systems used in console FPS games have comparable characteristics to Vanguard for identifying and blocking cheating. Systems like Ricochet in Call of Duty: Warzone and BattlEye in Rainbow Six Siege use kernel-level drivers for deep system monitoring, while Easy Anti-Cheat, used in Apex Legends and Fortnite, combines user-level and kernel-level components. All of these systems, like Vanguard, are continually upgraded to ensure their effectiveness against new cheating approaches.
Despite its virtues, porting Vanguard for consoles may cause a few challenges for some players—aside from the ardent cheaters. One potential issue is false positives, which occur when genuine devices or certain setups are incorrectly identified as cheaters. For example, third-party controllers or adaptive equipment used by disabled gamers may be misidentified as unusual. Riot has stated that it is looking into adapting features such as input device detection, therefore it is possible that the developer is currently working on this.
To eliminate any false positives, Riot will need to constantly develop its anti-cheat detection algorithms, as well as maybe incorporate a way for users to appeal and verify their hardware configurations. These adjustments could start during the game’s restricted beta testing, which begins on June 14, when console players finally get their hands on it.