This is why kernel-level anti cheats suck.
Welcome back, if you are a reader of this blog, you can comfortably say that I am a Valorant player. Not a good one, but I am a player. For the last couple of days, I can't play the game.
Now, this post is in no way a defence of cheating, and I didn't cheat, and this error is not about cheating, I don't condemn cheating, and fuck cheaters, honestly.
Anyhow, recently I am getting an error when I play the game like about five minutes. Not only this is really frustrating and itching me to remove myself from the existence, it is also given me several sanctions, an 8-hour one, a 1.5 minute one, a 1/2 hour one, etc.
The error is “secure boot verification failure”. Now, according to the non-existent (at least I think it this way) Riot Support™, the solution to this is pretty straightforward, and weird. At least that's what I saw from the Reddit post. I am not going to go to Riot Support™ once again, since I know they're just bad at helping these kinds of issues, from experience.
The peculiar part is, this seems to be a common issue between players, there are a lot of posts regarding this issue on Reddit. And some of them even go back to 2 or 3 years. But, there are not one documentation page or help page about the solution.
That being said, they supposedly wanted the Redditor to:
- Check if their secure boot is active (it is)
- Check their system is UTF-8 compliant (why?)
- Update their BIOS (my version is the latest) Of course, this didn't work.
Moving on, after that not resolving my problem, I turned my back to support and went to a hunt that took too many hours™ for nothing. I basically did:
- Reset all the secure boot keys with factory ones (this did mess up my Linux install, and did nothing for my actual issue, fun!)
- Updated my drivers
- Disabled Kernel DMA Protection
- Disabled virtualization (OS-wide. My workflow heavily includes virtualization on my Linux instance)
And all of this meant nothing at the end. As you can see, this is clearly a bug, at least if I am not going crazy (which I could be), and that means I can play the game because… fuck me that's why.
Jokes aside, I am looking for new solutions from those Indian guys from YouTube. I hope it will work, because I think I like that game.
By the way, this all happened when I plugged in my second monitor :clown:. I hope this is not related to that, and I won't have to wipe my entire fucking disk just for the sake of playing one little game that increases my stress levels anyway.
My thoughts about kernel-level anti cheat, on the other hand, is getting worse more and more. This is a dumb error that shouldn't happen, but it did, and now I am to blame no one but only myself for this, according to the developers (probably).