LoL’s new anti-cheat software is designed to destroy players’ gaming PCs

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Riot has released patch 14.9 for League of Legends. But that probably causes big problems for many players. Riot itself explains that it cannot be the fault of the game or the anti-cheat system.

What’s going on in LoL right now? After the release of “League of Legends” patch 14.9, parts of the community complain loudly about Riot and the MOBA: Players accuse the anti-cheat software “Vanguard” of destroying players’ PCs or deleting important operating system data.

However, Riot’s developers said that they have not yet “confirmed any cases in which Vanguard’s hardware was damaged.” And that’s surprising because reports of computers no longer starting up are increasing on Reddit and Twitter.

What is Vanguard? Vanguard is Riot’s new anti-cheat software and is currently being used to protect Valorant and LoL from cheats. Once installed, Vanguard will run at Windows startup unless uninstalled.

It is a kernel-mode driver: it checks other drivers and blocks them if it finds that they have a known vulnerability that could be used to compromise the anti-cheat client. The disadvantage is that the software can intervene deeply in the system.

Players complain about the anti-cheat software Vanguard on social media

What do the players say? The colleagues at PCGamesN quote several players who report their problems:

  • Someone explains that their notebook no longer starts and no longer draws power from the charger.
  • Another explains that he first had to remove the CMOS battery and reset the battery so he could get into the BIOS and repair the PC running Vanguard.

    • Others suspect that the number of unreported cases is much higher than the number of cases that Riot is currently using to argue for its own software. Many people would solve the problems themselves and therefore not report them at all. And of course these numbers would not be included:

    It’s hard to believe the numbers are so low. I personally had problems, but I fixed them myself and never reported them. I suspect very, very strongly that most problems go unreported.

    (via reddit.com)

    Another affected person adds that all the problems already existed with Valorant. For many people, certain hardware stopped working with Vanguard at all because it interfered with too many legitimate drivers, causing either the game or the PC to crash (via reddit.com):

    There were a lot of legitimate problems with Vanguard when Valorant launched. The official communication channels were quick to censor and shut down discussion about it.

    Riot says: No cases of broken hardware have been confirmed so far

    What does Riot say about this? The operators of LoL have now spoken out and responded to the players’ problems. Here’s how Riot explained (via dotesports.com):

  • Most initial problems are related to “common error codes” or driver errors, rather than anything malicious.
  • Notably, the developers stated that they “have not yet confirmed any cases of Vanguard hardware being corrupted.”
  • Riot added that some “confusing” BIOS issues had cropped up, but they were mostly related to UEFI mode switching and SecureBoot settings.
  • “Overall, the rollout has gone well and we are already seeing Vanguard working as intended. We have already seen a sharp decline in bot accounts in the usual places and we will continue to monitor this,” said Matthew “K3o” Paoletti, Riot’s anti-cheat manager.

    • Are the complaints new? No not really. As soon as Riot implemented its anti-cheat program in Valorant, there were many complaints on social media from players saying that their computers would no longer boot.

    Here, too, Riot replied at the time that it was not the game or Vanguard (via pcgamer.com). Rather, it was pointed out that other competitive games also use anti-cheat software that intervenes deeply in the system. For example Call of Duty, Overwatch or Apex Legends.

    The controversial anti-cheat tool Vanguard has also caught streamers and other personalities. One was in a Swiftplay game with other players when he was banned. The strange thing: The ban took place in the middle of developer Riot’s headquarters:

    Valorant: Dreaded anti-cheat tool strikes, banning streamer while playing at Riot HQ

    mmod-game