Riot has listened to player complaints over Valorant’s Vanguard anti-cheat program and as a result, players are being given more control over it.

Many members of the Valorant community found the anti-cheat program’s ‘always on’ feature intrusive and raised concerns over player privacy, due to its kernel-mode driver component.

In response, Riot has decided to give players the option to turn off Vanguard at any time, as detailed in a post on Reddit.

Vanguard will have a system tray icon where players can turn it off. However, while Vanguard is off, a player’s computer will be put in an untrusted mode, which will prevent them from playing Valorant until the system is rebooted.

Players who want to remove the program altogether can uninstall it from the system tray icon as well, but Vanguard will automatically be reinstalled when players launch Valorant.



Riot has also informed players that Vanguard could block certain incompatible or vulnerable software from running on players’ computers.

These new changes have already been implemented into Valorant, but Riot is still working on improving its anti-cheat program to make sure players don’t have any issues in terms of player privacy.

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