The head of Riot Games’ anti-cheat team Phillip Koskinas has confirmed why you can’t have Battlefield 6 and Valorant running at the same time. Yes, it involves a clash between EA’s Javalin anti-cheat and Riot’s Vanguard anti-cheat.
Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Koskinas wrote: “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 layman’s terms, both Valorant and Battlefield 6 need to run in a particular way while they are running on your computer. When it comes to interacting with game memory, they do the same thing. Detecting another program is messing around at the kernel level and touching things they are monitoring, the anti-cheats identify each other as potential problems and thus issues arise.
The conversation around Javalin and Vanguard causing problems together stems from several posts during last weekend’s Battlefield 6 open beta, in which some users were reporting error messages stopping them from playing the absurdly popular shooter while Valorant was running. So while you don’t need to uninstall Valorant to play Battlefield 6 this weekend for its second open beta, you should probably make sure the game is totally closed before you do so.
Still it’s easy to see why deep-access kernel level anti-cheats are used in games like Battlefield 6. According to EA, Javelin caught over 330,000 attempted cheaters over its first weekend. All this during what EA has dubbed Battlefield’s biggest open beta ever.
So for now it seems like an easy fix for those looking to get some Battlefield 6 games in. It does seem unlikely the way either Javelin or Vanguard work will be changing, due to the low number of players looking to run two shooters simultaneously. Still, as kernel-level anti-cheats become the norm these conflicts between opposing systems is something to keep an eye on.