Senior analyst details what makes VALORANT’s anti-cheat one of gaming’s ‘biggest success stories’

In a highly competitive shooter like VALORANT, nothing matters more than the integrity of the matches we play—and Riot Vanguard does an excellent job ensuring that. While having a kernel-level mechanism is definitely a plus, anti-cheat analyst GamerDoc says it’s the “bleeding edge” that makes Vanguard the absolute best.

Quoting a tweet from content creator Myth that hailed VALORANT’s anti-cheat as “one of the biggest success stories in gaming when it comes to combating cheaters,” GamerDoc detailed why Vanguard operating at kernel level doesn’t make it as much of a success as the team of very dedicated engineers who “are pushing the envelope in this space by building technology that puts us at the bleeding edge” does.

“Any company can develop a kernel driver. EAC, Battleye, and Ricochet all have kernel drivers,” GamerDoc said, indicating that none of these anti-cheat tools are as good as Vanguard. 

“Just because you operate at the kernel level does not mean that you automatically win the fight. That’s where the fight starts,” GamerDoc said, talking about where the actual responsibility of a successful anti-cheat program begins. “It’s a level playing field against cheat developers.” They also addressed players who “are scared to install a kernel driver” because of its intrusive nature, explaining the fear is apparently for nothing. 

In fact, “the data they fear of being taken and sold” can be accessed at the user level as well, without the need for admin access, according to GamerDoc. So you might as well trust a reliable video game developer like Riot and have a kernel-level driver installed to avoid VALORANT cheats.

GamerDoc also highlighted it’s not just Riot’s engineers, but the “operations teams, data team, and many others on the team” are also dedicated to developing new ways to combat cheaters in VALORANT. “No anti-cheat is going to be 100% effective in getting rid of everything, but it should be enough to ensure that players’ matches do not get ruined,” they wrote.  

There is a lot of uncertainty regarding Riot Vanguard’s reliability when it comes to our data safety, and such doubts have driven players to uninstall VALORANT for good as well. But as GamerDoc reiterated, there’s usually no harm in confiding in a reliable kernel-level service to keep the integrity of your experience intact.