Seriously, it’s fine.
The big topic of the last week has been Valorant, the latest first person shooter from League of Legends developer Riot Games. Riot Games is a big company with a big past and while the chorus of stream-viewing plebeians not popular enough to just be graced with a key from Riot all sit and wait for the small, small possibility that they be chosen among a group of millions in a key distribution scheme that is most definitely being gamed for the profit of a small group with a bot network, another smaller voice has slowly risen.
A voice of people who want nothing to do with Valorant.
For the Valorant-defiant, the number of reasons to distance themselves from the amalgamation of Counter Strike and Rainbow Six Siege is plentiful. Some refuse to support the company after the gender discrimination lawsuits. Others see Riot’s owner Tencent as an entity that can’t be trusted owing to its obligations to collect and provide information to the authoritarian Chinese government. Some merely don’t like the monetization scheme of League and feel it will come to Valorant eventually.
The latest PR backlash comes in the form of Valorant’s anti-cheat software; specifically one that requires the user to hand over the kernel level of security access to not 100% prevent but make cheating a whole damn lot harder. For Riot Games, the access is necessary in order to provide the most security against cheaters. For users, the software is a ticking time bomb of trust. If Valorant’s anti-cheat gets cracked as hackers are no doubt working tirelessly to do, it would put millions of PCs at risk.
It’s a grim reminder of 2005’s controversy surrounding Sony’s use of rootkit DRM in their music album CDs. The BMG software became the target of hackers exploiting vulnerabilities and Sony found themselves on the defendant bench in multiple class action lawsuits ultimately leading to the discontinuation of the software and the recall of all CDs with said copy protection on them.
So in response to the numerous arguments I’ve seen floating around the internet, I’d like to give my two cents and say that there is nothing wrong or “invalid” about not playing Valorant out of an excess of caution regarding the anti-cheat program. It doesn’t make one a cheater, it doesn’t imply they have something to hide or that there is a hidden agenda.
Valorant is a free to play video game, I’m going to guess your life isn’t going to be drastically changed one way or another regardless of if you decide to download it. Play it, don’t play it, leave the people alone who don’t do what you do.
And I know, telling people not to play a game if they don’t feel like it is sure to be a controversial take. That’s why they call me Controversy Conrad. Will I be downloading and playing Valorant? Maybe. I’m definitely not going to sit in a stream for 18 hours a day while in quarantine in order to get in a couple of months early though.
MMO Fallout 