Riot Says Its Valorant Anti-Cheat Update Can’t Brick PCs After A Joke Fuels Panic

Since it was first implemented into Valorant in 2020, Riot’s anti-cheat software Vanguard has been fairly controversial. Players have raised concerns about security, mid-game crashes, and the fact that Vanguard can somehow temporarily ban players from playing other games that aren’t even developed by Riot. Now, after a problematic update, Vanguard has found itself in hot water once again.

Recently, Riot Games pushed an update that detects and disables DMA (or direct memory access) cheating tools used for Valorant, even when a Riot game isn’t running or actively installed. Some players without DMA cards, who claim they’ve never cheated, have also alleged that Vanguard is now falsely detecting cheating software and causing some serious PC problems.

Riot stirred the pot early on Friday when it sent out a tweet bragging about the update with a photo of a bunch of “bricked” DMA cards that it deemed “$6k paperweights.”

congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight https://t.co/3rjZVQntrc pic.twitter.com/fS3JC0FL0p

— Riot Games (@riotgames) May 21, 2026

Later, Riot clarified that Vanguard isn’t actually bricking these devices. “Through our latest updates, Vanguard now makes those devices worthless for VAL, but does not in any way brick PCs or PC components or PC software,” its new tweet read.

While Riot has now clarified it was just joking about bricking devices, quite a few players are still concerned its anti-cheat tools are getting too aggro. Scroll through the Riot subreddit right now, and you’ll see that almost every recent post is a complaint about Vanguard. Obviously, the players who cheat via DMA are unhappy about these pricey tools being disabled in Valorant—that’s a given. But the most important part of all of this is that, despite Riot’s claims, players who claim they haven’t cheated at all say they are having issues with the new Vanguard update, too.

Some are alleging that they’ve been falsely banned or even forced to reinstall operating systems because of it.

Well, that escalated quickly.

There’s been a wave of claims by cheaters about Vanguard “bricking” their PCs, so let’s clear that up: Vanguard does not damage hardware or disable your devices.

The photo we posted is a picture of cheat hardware devices that are sold explicitly… https://t.co/dXb75Z91k9

— Riot Games (@riotgames) May 22, 2026

“Yeah I never cheated ONCE in my whole life in any game , I don’t even use Creative on my minecraft worlds, but my PC got bricked because of vanguard, had to Reset BIOS , Fresh install windows , lost all my stuff and hours of work because of it,” one player wrote.

“I was doing a routine cleanup of my PC and saw their anti-cheat flagged as potential malware in my registry entries. I don’t play Riot games (I downloaded the client for a 2XKO demo at some point). When I uninstalled the Riot client and removed the registry entry, it bricked my OS. They can absolutely get fucked. I’ll be joining whatever class action comes from this,” another player wrote.

“I was falsely banned. Had to contact riot dev to check and they fixed it… it can def happen,” another wrote.

Apparently, the damage that these players are reporting can be reversed with a full OS reinstall, but if Vanguard really is the problem, that’s still a concern. 

Beyond apparently banning players and temporarily causing PC-wide issues, the update is allegedly causing quite a few technical issues that are making Vanguard and Riot’s games difficult to download and launch. Other players have theorized that the Vanguard update might even be causing issues in other games. One player, who complained about Overwatch not being able to launch alongside League of Legends, ran into graphics card issues that they presumed were caused by the update.

“Clearly didnt f*ck up just cheaters,” they wrote.

Cheating in competitive games like Valorant is probably not great, and I get why developers want to implement anti-cheat software. If you don’t want players to cheat in your game, don’t let them cheat! But if what players are claiming about Vanguard is true, that’s a pretty invasive way to try to prevent it. Maybe don’t break their expensive hardware (and also the hardware of a bunch of innocent players) along the way?