VALORANT's controversial Vanguard anti-cheat is coming to League of Legends
Valorant’s controversial anti-cheat software will be coming to League of Legends this year in a bid to cut down on botting and cheating.
While this could help improve the rampant botting in League, Vanguard anti-cheat has previously proven to be controversial amongst players.
VALORANT’s Vanguard anti-cheat is coming to League of Legends this year
In a video exploring what changes would be coming to League of Legends in 2024, it was announced that the game would be adopting Riot’s anti-cheat software Vanguard, which is currently used in VALORANT.
Riot employee’s Andrei Van Roon and Jeremy Lee said: “Last year, we spent some time behind-the-scenes working on updating League’s anti-cheat and bot detection software, as our current version had fallen behind the times.
“This was compounded by the security breach earlier in the year, which increased our vulnerability to botting and cheating.
In January 2023, several new game cheats popped up after source codes for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics were hacked.
They continued: “A pretty consistent piece of feedback that we’ve been hearing from you all is the high number of bots in games, disruptive smurfs in Ranked, and an increase in scripting.
“One of our goals this year is to maintain and improve the competitive integrity in all of your League games, whether it’s in Ranked or normals, Clash, Arena, whatever. So, in late February or early March, we’re bringing Vanguard to League.”
Vanguard is a custom security tool developed by Riot Games which runs in the background and allows
The tool will allow for live matches to be terminated if any cheating is detected and LP will be refunded to any non-cheating players who are affected by this.
Similarly, offenders can receive hardware bans.
“We’ve seen a huge amount of success in their ability to catch and stop cheaters in their games, and we expect to see similar results when we implement it in League,” they concluded.
In the video, they stated that League’s version of Vanguard will operate at the kernel level, in a similar way to VALORANT’s version of the anti-cheat.
They stated that this has become essential for anti-cheat software to prevent bots and cheaters from quickly adapting and evading anti-cheat software as a result.
Vanguard has proven to be quite controversial amongst players
Despite having now been in use for several years, Vanguard has proven to be controversial in the past, with some players finding it invasive and not always accurate.
One of the issues that players have is that the software is “always-on” in the background with no ability to be switched off.
Some players have found that the software is able to uninstall itself which subsequently forced their computer to run in safe mode.
In 2020, one Valorant player shared on Twitter: “I’m pretty sure “Riot Vanguard” broke my PC. I’ve never once had a BSOD until installing Valorant and I’ve been getting them consistently now for the last 2-3 weeks.”
Another issue that players had regards innocent players, who have not been cheating, occasionally being caught in the crossfire.
Several League of Legends players have spoken out online against the anti-cheat being installed, stating that “this is so unnecessary” and that they don’t want to install the software on their PCs.
That said, it seems that Riot has had plenty of time to work on Vanguard, greatly reducing the number of programs that the software interacts with and ensuring that it is effective at banning cheaters.
