[Levitating]

Malware is deceitful, you're not aware of its presence. Anti-Cheat does what it's promises, and I've personally found Riot fairly transparent regarding Vanguard.

You don't have to play Valorant, but if you do you probably want to play without cheaters. It's either get hated for having cheaters (like CS2) or get hated for having invasive Anti-Cheat (Valorant). There's no third option.

[Ferret7446]

So if malware announces itself, it is no longer malware but anticheat?

"If you do not wire the money, the anticheat will activate and delete all your data"

[Levitating]

> So if malware announces itself, it is no longer malware but anticheat?

If it announces itself after installation it would obviously be malware. But if the software does exactly what the user expects it to do, and the user installs it with consent, why would it be malware?

Otherwise BitLocker or a disk eraser would be malware just because it performs a destructive action.

Wikipedia goes by the same definition, it's harmful software that operates without the owners knowledge.

It may seem like a weird hill to die on, but calling every Anti-Cheat or DRM a "rootkit" or malware kind of takes any meaning away from the term. And is also just misinformative to the workings of DRM and Anti-Cheat.

[mschuster91]

> It may seem like a weird hill to die on, but calling every Anti-Cheat or DRM a "rootkit" or malware kind of takes any meaning away from the term.

It's not the first time that DRM has caused damage. The Valorant one is particularly bad as no user should expect hardware damage or data loss even if they cheat, but I still 'member Sony's DRM that was a legitimate rootkit [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...