Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.
Summary:
The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.
The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.
Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.
Can you run games like this in a virtual machine? Would that eliminate kernel level general invasiveness concerns because it’s a…virtual kernel I guess? Does that virtualization require too much overhead to run demanding games?
Yes you can, but at the cost of performance and the risk of permanent ban. I believe there is a sizeable community of Valorant Players on Linux, which means all of them are using virtualization to bypass the anti-cheat.
The LoL is only for windows installs rn
I didn’t realize Riot even made any Linux distributions period.
They don’t, Linux players have to use wine. And it will be impossible afaik to play lol on Linux once vanguard is added.
As someone else said, there is no plan to add vanguard on macs
There’s ways in which a program can detect if it is running in a VM. If Riot made a kernel-level anti-cheat program, they’ll surelly also implement this.
They did implement this from my knowledge. I think SomeOrdinaryGamers made a video where he showcases hardening a VM to beat the detection.
I mean…that stupid university “anti cheat” rootkit browser called “lockdown” can detect if it’s in a virtual environment and say “this won’t run. Plz put me on bare metal so I can read all your secrets.”
I imagine this program wouldn’t find that hard to do either sadly.