As far as player interest is concerned, the current beta of Valorant has a lot to celebrate: Keys are still very popular and the Twitch streams for the tactical shooter are running around the clock. However, developer Riot also had to put up with a lot of criticism, especially to the anti-cheat system Vanguard. Now some changes are said to calm fan worries.
In a detailed Reddit post on Vanguard, Riot addressed the Valorant players and announced several measures that are now applicable:
- More transparency: From now on, Vanguard will use these icons to indicate when it is active on your PC. By default, the program continues even if you are not playing Valorant at all.
- Deactivation: If Valorant is not running, you can deactivate Vanguard at any time using the new icon. However, you can of course only continue playing if you reactivate the anti-cheat. You also have to restart your PC.
- Uninstall: It is also possible to uninstall Vanguard using the icon. However, it will be automatically reinstalled when you start Valorant.
If the icon annoys you, you can remove it via your notification settings for Windows.
"Yes, Vanguard is safe"
Furthermore, Riot made it clear that data protection was taken very seriously and that Vanguard had been extensively tested for safety by internal and external experts. The developer linked the Riot Policy to data protection, which of course is also committed to Vanguard.
"So no, we don't sell your data to China," the report says literally. Many players had expressed this concern, not least because Riot was owned 100 percent by Tencent, a Chinese gaming giant.
The how Vanguard works and why it is not wrongly controversial, we have examined in more detail in this article:
more on the subject
Valorant's anti-cheat program: Why fans fear it, but Riot still holds on to it
By the way, you shouldn't expect regular updates to Vanguard – according to Riot, it is usually not intended to report changes to the system.
As far as Valorant's gameplay is concerned, things are different, here the beta is being worked on during the beta: two of the agents were weakened in patch 0.47+.
