Valorant’s anti-cheat won’t automatically shut down your keyboard and mouse anymore

Valorant, Riot’s new competitive first-person shooter, launched with an aggressive anti-cheat solution called Vanguard that has already proven to be a little controversial. While the developer has already done what it can to assuage some of players’ worst fears about the system, Riot is now taking steps to make it a little less invasive.

On Thursday, Riot Games released a hotfix for Vanguard to make it more compatible with additional drivers — those bits of code that tell your PC how to run a given piece of hardware or software. Most of these were drivers that Riot had determined could be vulnerable to cheats, but the developer is expanding the list of drivers that it’s comfortable with. There are still some cases, however, where certain drivers will cause Vanguard to prevent Valorant from even launching.

Previously, Vanguard would simply disable those drivers that it found to be suspicious on its own and then launch the game Anecdotes of mice, keyboards, and even cooling fans shutting down unexpectedly abound. After the hotfix players will have to disable the questionable drivers manually if they want to launch Valorant.

Valorant’s anti-cheat lead Paul Chamberlain also took to Twitter to help clarify how this will fit into Riot’s future plans for anti-cheat.

“In the future we’re going to prefer non-blocking solutions to security issues/cheating vectors,” Chamberlain said. “We may still need to block drivers from time to time but it’ll be our last resort. We will prefer a non-invasive solution if one exists, including stopping the game from launching.”

While security for a popular online game, especially a shooter, will always remain a constant back and forth, Riot seems to be trying to make its war on cheaters as painless as possible for everyone else.

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