We are undoubtedly in the era of kernel-level anti-cheating.This is confirmed by the events that happened last week: Some Battlefield 6 test players were banned from playing before uninstalling a conflict software called "The Fearless Contract".

The root cause of the problem is a "turf battle" between Riot's Vanguard anti-cheating system and EA's new proprietary anti-cheating software for Battlefield 6.Similar to Vanguard, Javelin is also injected into the system with kernel-level permissions (higher than the access rights of Windows administrator accounts) to monitor your computer for any signs of violation.

Both of these two anti-cheating software are so aggressive in their anti-cheating strategies that they conflict when performing the same task.There was a comment saying: "[Vanguard] disguises itself as Windows by plugging itself into the underlying scheduling path and memory management of the operating system, in a way that few commercial drivers can do. And it's this that causes it to conflict with other games: kernel-level anti-cheating software has difficulty sharing control."

Although there was a clear error message prompt, in fact, playing Battlefield 6 does not require completely uninstalling "Defaultless Contract" - it just can't run them at the same time.Philip Koskinas, head of the Riot Anti-cheating department, clarified the misunderstanding in a tweet (X) earlier this week:

"Vanguard and Javelin are compatible, and you don't need to uninstall another anti-cheat system to play a certain game. However, Battlefield 6 is currently not allowed to run simultaneously with the Fearless Contract client, as both drivers are trying to use the same technology to protect the game's memory area."

In the same post, EA's anti-cheating director AC Ward also interjected and clarified, saying that Javelin's misinformation statement was suspected of exaggerating and would be fixed.

"The interception was initiated by Javelin, not Valorant. We will improve the error message when the game is officially released." AC Ward wrote, "Just stop running multiple game clients at the same time, and your CPU and GPU will thank you in the end."

To be clear: There is no problem playing Battlefield 6 while running Riot Launcher, it just can't run the complete "Defaultless Contract" game at the same time - then again, who would want to do this?

With kernel-level anti-cheating becoming mainstream, we see its pure intentions colliding with the boring reality of invasive software.Battlefield 6 has caused new troubles with the requirement to enable Secure Boot to run, another security measure to involve innocent personal computing devices in a firefight.