Valorant developer Riot was facing backlash after an apparent joke about turning cheaters' hardware into paperweights went haywire, but the company is now clarifying its Vanguard anti-cheat won't actually transform your PC into a sack of sprouted potatoes.
"Congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight," the official Riot Twitter account responded on May 21 to a cheaters' report that Vanguard now makes a ton of Valorant cheating firmware useless. Understandably, many Valorant players – both cheating and loyal – took this to mean Riot's controversial, kernel-level anti-cheat was destroying PCs just because it can. Riot says this isn't so, "Vanguard does not damage hardware or disable your devices."
"The photo we posted is a picture of cheat hardware devices that are sold explicitly for cheating in VALORANT (not normal PCs or PC components)," the company continues in a May 22 Twitter announcement. "Through our latest updates, Vanguard now makes those devices worthless for VAL, but does not in any way brick PCs or PC components or PC software."
"The cheat device won't work with our games, but your PC isn't 'bricked,'" Riot clarifies. "We would not, and cannot, impact your PC's functionality in any other fashion." The developer has also posted an FAQ to Twitter hammering in that Vanguard doesn't cause physical damage to a cheater's hardware, the company was not making a "joke" about paperweights, but simply pointing to "VALORANT cheat devices that no longer work in VALORANT," and that scrupulous players should be totally unaffected by any of this.
This explanation doesn't calm Valorant players' boiling anxiety that an anti-cheat program as invasive as Vanguard won't malfunction, or that Riot will never overstep its boundaries, souring Valorant to some degree for even some angelic gamers.
"I had vanguard on a fresh PC, played valorant with a buddy and then stopped the vanguard application from running to play something else," one player tells Riot as an example. "It made my computer crash and bricked the fuck out of it. I had to do a fresh windows install and wipe." Well, that's not really what "bricked" means, but you get the idea.
