You may not play League of Legends, and that's fair. I do, and have for years. It's one of my favorites, and I play it exclusively with friends. Recently, however, there's been some changes that have caused not just my friends, but a lot of people, to flee the game en mass.
What have they done? Well, they added a program called Vanguard that constantly monitors your computer and makes sure that you dont use scripting software to cheat. If you're like "is this DRM", its kinda worse. It's a program that can and does fuck around with your computer as an aim to stop you from cheating in a game. Some people dont really like the idea of giving control of their computer over to Riot, a company that's already had multiple database hacking issues
Already the idea is kinda repugnant, but since it's gone live, there have been reports of Vanguard claiming completely benign things are cheating and refusing to work unless you delete those programs, demanding players delete system32, and also just straight up bricking systems.
This is pretty bad, but the part that made all my friends go "fuck this noise", is Riots response. Leading to this, they've made several FAQs about it, and they're all written like edgy 2006 bullshit, written by a tech bro CEO who's fucking annoyed we're not shutting up and taking it. And after all this debacle has hit the fan, it looks like they're shutting down all discussion of it on the forums.
So uh, I think I'll step out of League for now.
i gotta say having done a lot of, shall we say, rootkit adjacent work, if vanguard doesn’t like something on your system you should verify that shit immediately. of the rootkit level anti-cheats i’ve had to deal with it has the best track record. every time it’s flagged something either a) i found a virus on that person’s computer, b) (normally) the library in question had a bunch of vulnerabilities which allowed trivial access to kernel level rce, or c) the person had cheats and wanted to get around vanguard.
not to say i like rootkit anti-cheat but in roughly 3ish dozen cases of helping people with vanguard issues there hasn’t been a case where doing what vanguard recommended wouldn’t make the computer more secure.
again! i wish we didn’t have kernel level anti-cheat, but i have yet to see any of the loud complaints about things other than the fact it is kernel level anti-cheat turn out to be valid. there are certainly issues that are being caused by vanguard but none of the viral ones i’ve seen have been.
take for example inout64 or w/e it’s called. it’s a commonly used library for RGB control (SignalRGB and others use it as backup) it has an RCE so easy to exploit i think it was intentional. so:
- vanguard blocks it from loading
- your rgb doesn’t work
- you get a cryptic message about vanguard blocking something random
- you tweet vanguard broke your rgb
also re “telling you to delete System32” posts are all posts showing a path to a driver file as above. not the full thing.
like yeah that’s super invasive but that’s just kernel level anticheat. from everything non-public i know vanguard is a lot better than EAC or nProtect (low bars but still).
wish there was no kernel level anti cheat period. but i think we lost that battle. but lets not take the impression farming and bot spam a face value.
