The girlies are fighting. And by girlies, I am of course referring to invasive anti-cheat solutions vying for territory at the deepest levels of your PC.
We are firmly in the age of kernel-level anti-cheat, a reality demonstrated last week when some Battlefield 6 beta players were restricted from playing until they uninstalled a conflicting bit of software called “Valorant.”
As detailed by Tom’s Hardware, the rub is a turf war between Riot Vanguard and Javelin, EA’s new proprietary anti-cheat software needed to play Battlefield 6. Like Vanguard, Javelin injects itself at the kernel level (a degree of access higher than a Windows admin account), monitoring your PC for any sign of rule-breaking.
Both anti-cheats are so aggressive in their cheat-countering tactics that they butt heads when trying to do the same thing. As Tom’s Hardware’s Hassam Nasir elegantly put it: “[Vanguard] basically impersonates Windows by inserting itself into the OS’s low-level dispatch paths and memory management in a way few other commercial drivers do. And this is where it collides with other games: kernel-level anti-cheats can’t easily share control.”
Despite the unambiguous error message, a complete purge of Valorant isn’t actually necessary to play Battlefield 6—you just can’t run them both at the same time. Riot head of anti-cheat Phillip Koskinas cleared up the misunderstanding in an X post earlier this week.
Battlefield 6 just told me to uninstall Valorant. Literally. from r/Battlefield
“Vanguard is compatible with Javelin, and you don’t need to uninstall one anti-cheat to use the other. However, BF6 does not currently allow the VALORANT client to be running simultaneously, because both drivers race to protect regions of game memory with the same technique.”
In the same thread, EA director of anti-cheat AC Ward chimed in to clarify that the Javelin error message is an exaggeration that’ll get fixed.
“The block is on the Javelin side, not the Valorant side. We’ll clean up error messaging in time for launch,” AC Ward wrote. “Just stop running multiple game clients at once, your CPU & GPU will thank you in the end.”
To be clear, playing Battlefield 6 while the Riot launcher is open is fine, you just can’t have the full Valorant game up simultaneously—why would anyone do that in the first place? Not all that dramatic, but I have to admit the whole thing leaves me more skeezed out by anti-cheat than I was a week ago. One always-on Vanguard is already enough. How many punk busters should I realistically trust with the keys to my silicon kingdom?
As kernel-level anti-cheat goes mainstream, we’re seeing its pure intentions slam headfirst into the annoying realities of invasive software. Battlefield 6 is also creating headaches by requiring Secure Boot to function, another security measure that’s catching innocent personal computing in the crossfire.
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