Vanguard update announced by VALORANT Dev Team

Recently, Riot Games has received a lot of flack for their new anti-cheat system known as Vanguard. While not wanting to make all changes public for the community, they wanted to let the community know that there were some changes specifically related to the issues many players found with the anti-cheat. These changes were announced on the official VALORANT Reddit thread on April 27th, 2020.

Riot Games developer 0xNemi wrote a post for the community regarding what the changes to Vanguard are and how these changes benefit the community. One of the main things Riot wanted to do for the community was to show its commitment to transparency when it comes to keeping the community safe. This point, along with their commitment to competitive integrity prompted them to take action due to the outcry of the general playerbase.

The biggest change to the anti-cheat software is that there will now be an indicator of Vanguard running as a system tray icon (shown below)

With this icon the players will be able to turn the anti-cheat off whenever they feel the need to do so. This then "puts your machine in an untrusted mode and will prevent you from playing VALORANT until you reboot." Although some may think that this seems very rigorous to put players through, the post goes into saying that by adding that "[They] want to operate at the highest possible standard for [their] players so that they never have to question whether or not they lost to a cheater." This specific statement has been echoed time and time again by the development team, pointing to the fact that they want their players to be protected by the highest standards.

This new update to Vanguard will come with the 0.49 patch that should be launched very soon, along with some minor fixes that will be listed later. One main question that the community asked to be addressed was when the Ranked system was to be implemented into the game. Riot Arkem addressed this in the mentioned thread that "If the next patch goes well we will turn on ranked matchmaking. It won't be immediate because we'll want to make sure the patch is stable and no major issues are discovered." This means that players will finally be able to hopefully shake out their competitive angst as they begin to grind to become the best players they can be.