What is Vanguard

Vanguard is basically an anti-cheat program which Riot games have added to their free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter to help protect Valorant from wallhackers and aimbotters. Check out our What is Vanguard in Valorant guide to find out everything you need to know about this security software.

Once Valorant has been installed on your PC Vanguard will run at Windows startup unless uninstalled. There are two parts to it:

• A kernel-mode driver that runs when your PC boots up

• A client that checks to make sure you are not running any cheats while you are playing Valorant.

Valorant uses a kernel-mode driver which protects your game from outside intrusion. The Vanguard software does not collect data about your PC or send anything to Riot Games, the developer of the game. Vanguard blocks drivers with known security vulnerabilities and looks also at other drivers and blocks them from running if it detects they could be used to compromise and exploit the game in some way to gain an unfair advantage. Vanguard was designed with the following in mind:

• Make Valorant naturally cheat-resistant

• Make cheats hard to develop.

• Catch cheaters through player reporting

• Catch cheaters with replays and machine learning (this is in development)

• Using hardware bans to keep cheaters from rejoining with new accounts

If you try and play Valorant without the Vanguard software installed the game will detect that the driver is not running with Windows and Valorant won't trust your PC, and you won't be able to play. That is why you have to reboot after installing Vanguard.

Check out our Character Tier List to find out more about the different types of characters in Valorant.