Chromtastisch

it's not hard to detect

Then why is not not detected yet in the highly praised anticheat? It's not like this bug was abused/tried in Battlefield V and other games already over a year ago...

Here's a simple but unsatisfying answer for you: It's not detected yet because I haven't made the detection yet. I haven't made the detection yet because this problem hasn't been my top priority.

The reason why Vanguard doesn't prevent this is because technically this is how graphics drivers are meant to work. It's a legitimate feature but not one we want to support on Valorant. Vanguard proactively protects against cheats that plan to modify the game rather than stuff like this.

Instead of making the detection I'd rather fix the underlying issue in game. If this becomes more popular or a fix will take longer than I'd like then I'll make a detection and ban all the people.

Anyone using this for competitive advantage should know that they can be banned for it even if I have to do it manually without an automated detection.

[deleted]

[deleted]

Sorry, we want the game to have as consistent a look as possible for all the people playing.

We'll try and optimize the game further to help you run it but we're unlikely to implement any graphics options that drastically change how the game looks.

Hoodrat10

Hey, I have a question about radar, why did you guys update it that it no longer shows the character you are playing but replaced with white blob that is significantly big on the radar. No one asked for it please do not go the h1z1 route.

We think that showing your character portrait made it harder for players to read the minimap and that it was useless information since you should know what agent you're playing without needing to see the portrait.

There's a good chance that we change how this looks further to improve clarity more. I personally don't like how big the player indicator is and I'd be surprised if I was the only one.

the_arksis

While the uninstall option seems to act as a disable for next boot alternative, I feel that it isn't clear that Vanguard will be installed on startup of Valorant. I have hesitated to uninstall Vanguard due to this, thinking that it would require me to redownload Valorant entirely or break the current game state. Maybe providing some more information to the user would be beneficial, such as renaming the option to "Disable until next Valorant startup (requires reboot)"?

Thanks for the feedback!

mped14

Any plans on ping lock via region. We had a game last night where one player in the game had 156 ping every one else both sides had 23-35 ping and the 155 ping put up like 34 kills and had some insane peak advantage. Generally in MP games for FPS I find that when I (west coast) play with east coast players its usually no higher than 70 ping and the game seems stable. 156 ping makes me think it was a EU player on the NA severs using that ping to get a serious advantage.

We've talked about it and agree that it could be useful but it's not high on our to-do list.

In our testing players with high ping are a pretty high disadvantage even when peeking. We've tried to make the game in a way that having a bad network connection only makes things worse for you and does not give you any advantages.

thescrag

Hi, any reason Riot Vanguard must rust even when the game is closed? Seems kinda invasive considering it's appeared after an update..

Vanguard has always been running while the game has been closed but we thought it would be better to give you a tray icon so you can see that it's running and exit it/uninstall if you like.

Vanguard has a component that runs from system startup to ensure that when the game (and the rest of the anti-cheat) starts the system is in a known protected state. This makes it harder for cheats to be loaded into the system in a way that we couldn't detect.

1Leep

Are there more optimization patches planned anytime soon? You can see by the threads people are still getting poor performance

We're looking into performance at the moment. My change improved performance for some players but there are some other performance issues that we're investigating.

I don't think we'll ever be "done" with looking for optimizations though! We're hoping to always be making the game perform better.

Timesup2323

Will you consider implementing a shadow ban system where you only match detected cheaters with other detected cheaters to effectively quarantine them to "cheater lobbies" until they are dealt with in the next ban wave? Other games do this and it's a good method for getting cheaters out of games while still slowing cheat development.

I haven't been a fan of "cheater island" in the past because I always figured that cheaters would quickly figure that they've been flagged (different matchmaking queue time, different quality of matches).

It might be worthwhile if the quarantine time is short enough, for example if banwaves were coming every 12 hours, then maybe flagging the accounts for some sort of soft ban immediately would reduce the damage they do but not give cheat developers much of a head start.

Maybe I'm letting the perfect be the enemy of the good but I'd rather try to get to a world where we were banning all cheaters immediately on detection (which is only partially true today).

fpswilly

Do the cheat developers sell these hacks? Surely immediate bans are always better since there will be less impact on genuine players and the cheat devs will not get enough money to justify continuing to write cheats. Got to battle the cheat devs first imo - cut the cheaters off from their source. But, then again, I’m no expert in this so I don’t really know the dynamic between the cheaters and the cheat devs.

We do try and focus our efforts on cheat developers, even taking them to court sometimes: https://www.pcgamer.com/riot-awarded-10-million-in-in-leaguesharp-lawsuit-settlement/

mped14

Ever think of adding 2 factor or verified phone number to accounts that want to play ranked? Seems like that would be a lot more annoying to setup for each account after they get banned

I would love more account verification and security options. We have people working on it but I'm not sure what the current ETA is.

Jeanes223

Out of curiosity, why don't game companies have a team dedicated to going to Google and just typing in game name cheats. Hell if you do it for a game like siege you get stuff thats like "Our software hasn't been detected since x time." It seems like the easiest way.

Our anti-cheat ops team does a more sophisticated version of this to keep track of the cheats available on the market. We generally find that the cheats that you can find from Google are low quality or fake but we keep an eye on them anyway.

Tsanummy

It's probably just nvidia settings shenanigans, super low LOD level.

This used to work in csgo as well to remove smokes.

EDIT: Just so that we're clear, this is super easy to detect and WILL probably get you banned, don't bother.

Yeah, I'm working with nvidia to figure out the best way to stop this kind of thing.

Definitely don't recommend people do this, like /u/Tsanummy says it's not hard to detect.

Atalvez

For clarification: there is a decent chance that the anti-cheat software caught this but hasn't banned the player yet. It is common to send out bans in waves to prevent hackers from being able to quickly test what is and isn't detectable.

Yeah, we do both immediate bans and banwaves depending on the circumstances. We prefer immediate bans but sometimes it's better for us to delay so that the cheat developers don't learn that they're detected for a while.

TheNamesFrosty

Fully serious question, if I usually use something like hw monitor to monitor my temps and voltage, and vanguard now blocks this. How am I supposed to tell if vanguard or valorant is actually the cause, if I can’t compare when it’s on and off? So is there a way to actually monitor differences in performance?

You can select "Exit Vanguard" from the system tray or "Uninstall Vanguard" and compare the performance that way.

Vanguard also isn't blocking hardware monitoring software specifically, just some vulnerable drivers that are sometimes used by hardware monitoring tools.

There are tools that work fine (I tested the latest NZXT Cam last night and it looked ok) and tools that don't currently work with Vanguard will likely be updated to replace the blocked driver soon.

znaczki65

Don't know whether you read my direct message to you or you heard thousands messages of the community on Valorant reddit or Discord, tho good job Arkem.

One question does it only exits the Vanguard Client or also Kernel Driver (when I click Exit Vanguard). One more (I lied that is one only) does it require a reboot after exiting to exit completely?

Thanks for the kind words!

"Exit Vanguard" unloads the driver, so no components of Vanguard should be running afterwards. The Vanguard Client should only be running when the game is running so there's no need to exit it.

pupp3h

After a bunch of trial and error, it appears to be down to iCUE and the cpuz149 driver it uses, however it would be cool if you can fix this issue so that the notification shows this rather than having to spend a couple hours to figure it out :)

I think there is a newer version of the cpuz driver that isn't blocked, I don't know if there's a way to manually update it or whether you'll need to wait for iCUE to update.

If you miss the popup in the future the name of the blocked image will be in your registry here: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vgk under "BlockedImage"

SterbaM

Any chance you can say what the issue with Core Temp 1.15.1 is? Vanguard is blocking it from starting, and I get a notification that Vanguard has blocked something, but when I click the notification vanguard does nothing/doesn't give me any details.

I don't know what driver it uses but my guess would be either a vulnerable driver (like MSI Afterburner did) or the driver isn't signed in a way that complies with Microsoft's Secure Boot requirements.

Theostru

Hi /u/0xNemi and /u/RiotArkem !

Is there a way to check what was blocked beyond the notification? On boot, the notification disappeared before I could click it, and when I then went to notification center and clicked on it, it went away without presenting any popup or additional information on what was blocked.

Reading this thread, I'm 99% sure it was HWMonitor, but the fact that I have to rely on an ephemeral popup rather than an actual application or even just a log file is pretty frustrating.

The name might be in this registry key, you can take a look: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\vgk\BlockedImage

DrAgus_

I don’t have any questions, you’ve laid out everything very clearly and understandably. I just wanted to say that I appreciate the amount of transparency we’ve received from all you devs. As someone who as 2,500+ hours of CSGO (like many other VALORANT players) I’m beyond excited to actually see the dev team working with players, and communicating exactly what’s going on. Enjoying the game probably way too much, and I’m very excited for ranked to come out soon. Keep it up VALORANT Dev Team!

Thank you for the kind words!

IvoAlbino

Any info on the BSOD many people are having due to Vanguard? I'm struggling so hard with the AC I had to uninstall the game otherwise I keep having blue screens...

If it's still happening after yesterday's update can you file a support ticket and provide them the BSOD crash dump? (It'll be C:\Windows\Memory.dmp)