Tencent owned Riot Games has come under fire recently for Valorant’s anti-cheat system, which not only runs when the game runs, but also keeps running even when you exit the game. In fact, it never stops running once it’s installed and booted up for the first time. The software only stop running when you shut down your computer.

A tweet from mirta000 warning people away from the game under a tweet from PC Gamer, who was shilling for Valorant with a tips and tricks guide.

Before ANYONE touches Valorant:https://t.co/10C9d9249l
It has a kernel level anti-cheat that boots itself every time when your PC launches and the only way to avoid it is to uninstall it.

Now you can make a decision to install malware or not.

— mirta000 (@mirta0001) April 13, 2020

The tweet features a link to Reddit, where there’s a thread over on /r/PCGaming/ that is making its way around the web from voidox 1, who breaks down what the anti-cheat software does and why it’s so dangerous, writing…

“The kernel anticheat driver (vgk.sys) starts when you turn your computer on. To turn it off, you either need to change the name of the driver file so it wouldn’t load on a restart, or you can uninstall the driver (it will be installed back again when you open the game).

“so ya, the big issue here is it running even when players don’t have the game open, from startup no less. EDIT – It runs at Ring 0 of the Windows Kernel which means it always has the same rights as administrator from the moment you boot.”

The issue also reached the YouTube space, where TheQuartering did a video about the controversy.

For all the CCP shills willing to dismiss the concerns as “it’s just anti-cheat software, bro!”, voidox 1 goes into a few explanations as to why it’s as bad as it sounds, and what it could even potentially mean to the safety of your PC and, more importantly, your information.

In the post he explained…

“[…] you have a piece of software that can’t be turned off, that runs with elevated privileges non-stop on your system. If someone with malicious intent can figure out a way to use it as a rootkit… like come on, riot are not magicians creating perfect software that can’t be cracked or beaten (as apparently some valorant fans think) [sic]”

Voidox also takes aim at the CCP shills, criticizing them for dismissing the issue.

We saw some similar shilling during the Blitzchung debacle, where some people attempted to defend Blizzard for suspending Blitzchung from Hearthstone and the commentators, claiming that the game was no place for a player from Hong Kong to share their opinion about Hong Kong during a live broadcast.

Given how much control China has over the gaming industry, and Tencent’s ties to the Chinese state party, as reported by Bloomberg, everyone should be worried about this in the same way they were worried about the Epic Games Launcher scraping data from their hard drives whenever the client was booted up.

(Thanks for the news tips BitterBear and Tim at Where)