I'd have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.

Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you'd be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn't caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch "real" cheaters.

As someone who rehosts an old game after the official servers shutdown, we have a dedicated servers for cheating and real moderators for the non-cheat ones. It works great but big corps don't way to pay for mods.

I also wonder why big companies don't do it to train ML algorithms on the cheat server data too..

Honestly I'd rather have a cheater in my lobby than Riot Games deep into the sections of my PC they should never have accessed.

With that said, I do not play Valorant for this reason (and also because it would require me to dualboot since Vanguard cannot be ported on Linux, lol)

I'd be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.

But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that's it. They don't care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.

The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google "valorant cheat .exe" and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.