Valorant anticheat system is working even when you don't play the game

Valorant beta is off to a good start, and Riot sure must be happy about it. The biggest Twitch names are playing the game, while often more than a million viewers are almost always watching Valorant on Twitch.

One of the most controversial recent things when it comes to Valorant and Riot, in general, was their new anti-cheat system. This new anti-cheat gives Riot complete control over your system using a 'kernel driver'. You can read more about it in our dedicated article.

It was already something that made people really worried. They were concerned about how will this affect their privacy, especially considering that Riot is owned by Tencent, a prominent Chinese corporation, which was a big red flag for many players.

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Now, as more players are getting their access to the beta, and can find out more about the game, one player noticed that Valorant Anticheat (kernel anti-cheat driver vgk.sys) starts upon computer boot and it stays turned on even if you don't play the game. This Reddit thread got significant attention, and RiotArkem, anti-cheat lead on Valorant, confirmed with a comment that it is intended behaviour.

"Yes we run a driver at system startup, it doesn't scan anything (unless the game is running), it's designed to take up as few system resources as possible, and it doesn't communicate to our servers. You can remove it at any time," Arkem sais in his comment.

"This is good for stopping cheaters because a common way to bypass anti-cheat systems is to load cheats before the anti-cheat system starts and either modify system components to contain the cheat or to have the cheat tamper with the anti-cheat system as it loads. Running the driver at system startup time makes this significantly more difficult."

He also wanted to stress out that the driver does not collect or send any information about your computer back to Riot and that it doesn't scan anything unless the game is running. He finishes his post by assuring players that they will remove it if "our security tools do more harm than good ."

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Some players are okay with this transparency, but others don't like these intrusive measures, even if they aren't harmful. Some think that this will open security holes for people with malicious intentions while others are still simply worried because Tencent is behind it.

What are your thoughts on this? Are you okay with this kind of measures for the sake of removing cheaters?