Valorant Anti-Cheat

[WambleCropped]

So ive been eyeing valorant but I remembered that the game's anti-cheat was terrible and could sometimes brick your PC. Is this still true or did they fix this?

[FeIIex]

It is intrusive and runs at the kernel level of the OS, making it a very tempting attack vector.

 

Never heard of it bricking PC's myself, but the security risk it presents is another story..

[Nena Trinity]

One person once claimed his computer caught fire thanks to this game so I dunno... :I

[demonix00]

The vanguard anti cheat starts at boot and as far as I'm aware will still screw around with legitimate programs that it thinks are used for cheating even when the game is not running and even if you stop it, you have to reboot your computer to be able to play the game because they didn't even bother to put in a routine that allows the game to auto start the anti-cheat when it runs so it's just going to be too much of a pain to deal with.

[Quackwich]

4 hours ago, demonix00 said:

The vanguard anti cheat starts at boot and as far as I'm aware will still screw around with legitimate programs that it thinks are used for cheating even when the game is not running and even if you stop it, you have to reboot your computer to be able to play the game because they didn't even bother to put in a routine that allows the game to auto start the anti-cheat when it runs so it's just going to be too much of a pain to deal with.

I believe they added the ability to kill the anti-cheat if you're not running Valorant. You'll need to enable it again to play Valorant though.

 

But to answer OP's question, in general, the anti-cheat is still considered intrusive since it's kernel level. Ars Technica did a run down of Valoran's anti-cheat system and how it works.

[kirashi]

9 hours ago, WambleCropped said:

So ive been eyeing valorant but I remembered that the game's anti-cheat was terrible and could sometimes brick your PC. Is this still true or did they fix this?

They implemented the ability to "quit" their malware application by right-clicking a system tray icon to exit it, but since it's closed source, you can't be certain the driver has actually been unloaded from the kernel, so I still wouldn't trust it.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, FeIIex said:

It is intrusive and runs at the kernel level of the OS, making it a very tempting attack vector.

 

Never heard of it bricking PC's myself, but the security risk it presents is another story..

I think this is why my PC is stuttering so much...