Valorant's anti-cheat is now disabling input devices, users report

Since the very first day of the Valorant's closed beta launch, we're constantly reading about problems with Valorant and its infamous anti-cheating software called Vanguard.

The first concerns started when it was revealed that it uses a "kernel driver", which gives the game a complete control over your system, and this was months before closed beta started.

When the beta started, people soon realized that Vanguard is starting along with your computer and it is constantly working even if you don't play the game, which was another red flag.

Riot responded to all those concerns, but that wasn't enough and people wanted to be sure that it will not harm their computer, so Riot decided to give some more control to players.

The strange thing is that, despite all these hard measures, the game is still full of cheaters using aimbots and wallhacks, which raises questions if the system is even effective as they say it is.

The latest problem, and possibly the biggest one yet, has been revealed yesterday with numerous reports by players on Reddit and official forums.

It appears that, after the latest update, Vanguard is disabling input devices at boot causing PC to soft brick.

This was first reported by Reddit user Hugometeo, in a Reddit thread that now sits at 19.2k upvotes.

"I just spent the last 3 hours figuring out why I couldn't get into Windows because my keyboard and mouse wouldn't work," he says. "Just before that, I started smelling hot plastic - my graphics card was running +90°C because again, Vanguard disabled my cooling software."

He concludes that "Vanguard really needs to prevent us from launching the game while X software is active -and asking us to close it, even if we need to reboot just after- instead of disabling everything silently."

Another user in the comments says: " After the last update, I rebooted (and I don't like to be forced to) the system and I couldn't log in because both mouse and keyboard didn't work. I solved the problem, uninstalled Vanguard and Valorant altogether."

It appears that Vanguard is silently turning off random things in your computer if it finds them to be a threat to Valorant's integrity, even though they obviously aren't a problem. It acts more like an anti-virus/malware software, it's doing things out of players control and without any notifications what is going on, which is understandably unacceptable for many.

Riot Arkem (main anti-cheat developer) responded with a vague answer which wasn't satisfying for the players, who downvoted him to oblivion.

" We're working on ways to make the experience better. Our current notification pop-ups aren't as good as they could be and we're looking for ways to give you more control over how Vanguard works," he said. "We're happy to do anything we can to make this smoother for everyone as long as it doesn't give an opening for cheaters."

Whatever Riot decides, they need to act quickly. Players are starting to get impatient with all these problems, and even the biggest defenders of the system are starting to have doubts and second thoughts.