League of Legends and Valorant developers Riot Games have added an optional "on demand" mode to their Vanguard anti-cheat software. With this new mode enabled, Vanguard will only run when you fire up a game it needs to be active for, duly shutting down once you exit said game. Up until now, the only option has been the default one: having Vanguard start up the moment you turn your PC on, then run in the background until you shut down.

"Starting later today, the universally beloved anti-cheat product, Vanguard, will begin to support on-demand sessions from all sufficiently secured PC devices," Riot's head of anti-cheat Phillip Koskinas wrote in an announcement post put out on June 24th. "'On-demand' here means that Vanguard’s driver component will no longer launch when the system starts, but 'secured' indicates that this will be possible only if that system’s hardware has met a set of modern security requirements. By opting into pre-boot security mechanisms and Windows’ own native protection features, Vanguard can safely end its watch, and your taskbar can have 256 of its pixels back."

Yep, in order to enable on-demand mode, you'll need to ensure you satisfy what Riot have dubbed a Vanguard Pre-Check. According to Koskinas, about 35% of Riot's players are on relatively new hardware which will likely already be in the Windows 11 secured-core state required to pass Vanguard's Pre-Check, so will be able to switch into on-demand mode right out of the gate.

For anyone not in that bracket, some dicking around in the settings awaits. You'll need to be running Windows 11 25H2 or later, with UEFI mode, secure boot, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity and Input-Output Memory Management Unit all enabled. You may also have to update your BIOS. Riot have individual guides on how to enable all of the stuff that needs enabling linked in their post, if you want to down that road.

According to Koskinas, about 3% of Riot's current weekly players are on older hardware that won't meet the Pre-Check requirements, so on-demand mode simply won't be available to such folks unless they upgrade. If you're in that boat, always-on Vanguard will remain your only option, as it was for everyone else prior to this new mode being offered. Those on eligible PCs can, of course, also stick with the devil they know if they wish by choosing not to opt-into the optional on-demand mode.

"Ultimately, for competitive online spaces to persevere, it is necessary that we be able to trust the endpoints that the games are played on, so as it evolves, you can start to think of Pre-Check as a “proof-of-life” layer for gaming," Koskinas wrote to conclude the announcement. "That said, friction is not fun, and we prefer incentives to requirements. For that reason, our trust segmentation will be surgical, and while we might add more checks to Pre-Check in the future, we plan on keeping things optional until you’re in the most competitive segments, on the strangest devices, or amongst the highest ranks."

The new mode's unlikely to make Riot's electric eye any less controversial or prone to fuelling understandable concerns about the level of access it grants the publishers to players' PCs, but it is at least an alternative folks can consider to the version Riot themselves jokingly acknowledge in this post has an "omnipresence".