Riot Games’ League of Legends has been polarizing in its decade of existence. There are a lot of people who spent hundreds of hours on the free-to-play MOBA and there’s also a lot of people who have encountered a toxic match where a friendly player or an enemy trash-talks them into submission (myself included.) Riot recently announced a plethora of new titles across many different genres, the first being Valorant, currently in its beta phase.

When a game is large, it’s bound to have cheaters, though. Just last week, Valve suffered some serious setbacks as Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (which Valorant takes a lot of cues from) had a breach in source code, resulting in a lot of players having their computers compromised. With the upcoming hype for Valorant, Riot ensured their anti-cheat was up-to-snuff in preparation for the players who want artificial talent.

Riot’s answer is requiring kernel access from every player’s computer. In short, this means a rootkit is implemented into the player’s PC, combating cheating software before a game’s anti-cheat would typically get run ahead of launching the game. Unfortunately, this means that when Valorant is running, it is examining your PC within all of its facets. Of course, players consent to this when accepting the Terms & Conditions, but it still feels more intrusive than any other game has been before.

The good news is that there have been no reports of tomfoolery to this point. In fact, from what I’ve heard, cheaters get detected mid-game and get shut down immediately. Riot support has been communicative about this, as well, which is always a good sign. I’ve only put a few hours into the game so far and, thankfully, I haven’t had any cheaters ruin my fun. The game is a blast and, while its learning curve is humongous, I foresee myself sinking several more hours into it.

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