Valorant’s anti-cheat system, Vanguard, has been the subject of many a Reddit discussion since the launch of the closed beta in early April. Many players aren’t happy with the fact Vanguard launches on system boot, so now Riot Games has just released an update that will “give you, the player, more visibility, and control over it.”
Talking about the update on Reddit, senior software engineer in game security, Nemanja ‘0xNemi’ Mulasmajic, says you’ll be able to turn off Vanguard “at any time” now starting from today using an icon in the system tray.
“Turning off Vanguard puts your machine into untrusted mode and will prevent you from playing Valorant until you reboot,” he says. “If you want to keep Vanguard off indefinitely until you play Valorant (e.g. persisting across multiple reboot systems), you’ll be able to do so more easily now by uninstalling from the handy dandy system tray.” It is worth noting though that Vanguard will be reinstalled once you boot Valorant again though.
If you don’t like the Vanguard logo sitting in your system tray either, you can disable (or reenable) it via the Windows Notification Area.
This update, which should go live today (April 28) is designed to give players more authority over the programs installed on their computers. To allay concerns over data, Riot Games had a number of security firms analyse the software before putting it in the hands of players.
The studio is also paying bounties up to $100,000 for proven Vanguard exploits to make it safe for all.