Riot’s next big game has been making some serious waves. Valorant is currently in its closed beta and it has already broken Twitch viewership records. However, not everything has been good for the new game. Even though Valorant hasn’t received a full launch, it is already being plagued by several hackers and cheaters. In hopes to counter that, Riot Games is giving away $100,000 to anyone who can find an exploit in their anti-cheat software.
This bounty type system has been present for a while now. It was first started back in 2014 with various price rewards starting from $250. However, the amount has been increased to motivate more people to find the exploits as a proper launch for Valorant is just around the corner. The prize depends on the severity of the found exploit. More information about this is mentioned on the Valorant official site. The company has already given $2 million in prize money alone.
All of this is really important for Riot as their anti-cheat software has already created a bit of controversy. The program, called Vanguard, works on a Kernel level compared to other anti-cheat programs that work at the User level. This can give Vanguard access to the entire PC and can compromise the user’s privacy. The program will start during the boot time rather than when you launch the game, so you can’t even turn it off.
Due to this, several potential players have hesitated from playing Vanguard, including myself. Riot has posted a blog post defending their anti-cheat software and ensured fans that their private information won’t be compromised.
"Vanguard is a solution that will help us achieve the vision of competitive integrity while enabling us to continuously adapt our arsenal in the war against cheaters," Riot said in their blog post. "Players have every right to question and challenge us, but let’s be clear--we wouldn't work here if we didn't deeply care about player trust and privacy and believe that Riot feels the same way, we're players just like you, and we wouldn't install programs on our computer that we didn’t have the utmost confidence in."
