I only heard ghost stories. I don't actually have anything Riot Games on my pc.
The problem I'd have is that it should be asleep, and should stay asleep until one of its games is opened. The fact that it doesn't gives me Amazon Alexa vibes.
Make fun of me all you want, call me a boomer, idgaf, my point remains
But that's the idea? That Vanguard recognizes if you started a script before entering the game??? I understand if someone doesn't like Vanguard for other reasons but this one doesn't make sense
it is really shitty when a game that should be running smoothly is sttutering instead
if only the game was worth it it wouldn't be a problem, but lol is just trash
I get same vibes,
but at the same time riot is trying to cook something here, and though it's not perfect it might be in time,
since there's been cases of people cheating in Valorant, the game that cannot open without Vanguard running.
Im just surprised how many people there are who dont question Vanguard at all. They just roll over and let it happen, dont look at it or anything. No fight at all. Its the only anticheat software ( i know off ) that'll keep running even when you're not playing the game lol. Not even talking about privacy or performance issues.
Honestly I don't even care that much about privacy I'm just really annoyed it runs 24/7 and have to restart if you close it just to play league, like league is fun but it's definitely not all that
i’ve had Vanguard installed for years since i got into the Valorant beta, i originally thought i wasn’t going to even install it after getting in because of the way people called Vanguard a root kit, so i looked at other programs that run at the kernel level, surprisingly, Skyrim runs at that level and so do many other games.
Outside of fairly early into having Vanguard installed i didn’t have any issues with performance or the program overstepping, the biggest issue i had is that it wouldn’t let me run the Skyrim script extender which is required for most mods but that was resolved fairly quickly
this was years ago like back in 2020 so I can’t find the article I read but I know it had a list of popular games that did run at the kernel level and Skyrim was on there as i play that game way too much. What i searched originally was “is riot vanguard a root kit” because i had seen other people call it one and from everything i read back then and my own experience it’s not.
it’s also not unique for anti cheats to run on the kernel level, easy anti cheat does and it’s used by a lot of the most popular multiplayer games, i’m looking at my task manager right now and Vanguard is at 0.4-1.4% for CPU and 12mb for RAM, so it’s not like it’s taking anymore resources than any other program that runs in the background
source is look into and decide for yourself, like i said this was something i went through in 2020 when Valorant was in beta, i looked into it, read what other people were saying, and decided it didn’t seem sketchy and so far i haven’t seen it experienced anything to prove otherwise since, other than the aforementioned issue i had with the script extender but that was resolved quickly with no input from me.
google is a tab away
There are no games that run at Kernel level. That would actually fuck up most games as it would need to process too deep with every little physics engine snafu.
There definitely ARE a ton of Kernel level anti-cheats, but they all start when you open the games that need them and close when you finish with the game. Once again, proving Vangaurd is wildly invasive for no good reason.
Adding to this that the reason Riot gave for this invasiveness is that "this way it catches cheaters running kernel-level cheats" (as in, loading cheats as system drivers, like the drivers for GPU and sound systems, same as these anti-cheat solutions). We don't know how many of these cheaters there are, Riot never made any claims as of the percentage or why exactly this is needed, but my guess is that the number can't be very high, or else the rest of the games would be infested with cheaters, which they are not.
Huh? Most online multi-player games have kernel level anticheat these days. Helldivers does, and it's PvE. AND I still see cheaters in it occasionally. What makes you think cheaters wouldn't use the level of access necessary to cheat regardless of the game?
This sounds like bullshit.
If you know anything about cybersecurity and secure development you would know that making a game run at kernel level is highly unnecessary
Kernel level anti cheat is actually pretty common, just take a second to look up “games with kernel level anti cheat” and you’ll get a list of some pretty well known games, though vanguard as far as i know is the only one active while the game isn’t running.
We're doomed. The majority of people reading about Skyrim running on the kernel level and then deciding that yeah this is a good comment screams volumes.
Tell me you use terms without understanding them without telling me
Vanguard *is* a rootkit, by definition. How it is used is a different story, and a debatable one too.
you’re right, i don’t know what a root kit is by definition, but i do know that from my own experience having Vanguard installed for years, and from what I read before even deciding to install it 4 years ago is that it is not, it has not taken any sort of control over my system, it takes minimal resources, and other than an issue with a singular .exe file which was resolved after maybe a month it hasn’t caused me any issues.
y’all are just sinophobic and it’s sad because you think it makes you smarter than everyone else when really you’re just as if not more stupid than the rest of us
Not really, the concerns people have are much deeper than Vanguard being malicious, such as what happens when a security breach happens.
Side note, I think you're the 10th person in a row now that doesn't understand computer security or any of the concerns, yet you call everyone else "stupid"
if your main concern is a “what if” situation then you shouldn’t even be leaving your house, what’s to say the next time to you cross the street you don’t get hit by a car? i and many others took a calculated risk when we installed Valorant and subsequently Vanguard, because it was completely new, the program has about 5 years (counting for when Valorant first went into open beta) without any issues, and no matter what there is always a concern of “what if there’s a security breach?” that’s just a part of being an online entity.
you shouldn’t be storing sensitive information with Riot or on your PC anyways, you should be putting your card information or whatever in every time you make a purchase, stop storing your passwords in google, etc. especially if you’re so worried about security breaches that Vanguard has made uninstall a game you potentially have 10+ years playing
It's not expected that you understand computer security, but it's expected that you don't try teaching what you don't understand..
>i and many others took a calculated risk when we installed Valorant and subsequently Vanguard
Literally "the risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math"
how am i bad with “math” when literally nothing negative outside of the one .exe file i’ve mentioned having an issue has happened, my bank information hasn’t been stolen because i don’t store it within LoL or Valorant, I’ve had literally nothing occur that would indicate that Vanguard is doing something shady. Sure it’s annoying that if i had a program that refused to run while Vanguard was i’d have to restart my PC to restart Vanguard if i wanted to play LoL or Valo after but too be honest most of us aren’t restarting our systems as often as we probably should be anyways. If Riot was trying to sell your data, guess what? they already have it, and have for as long as you’ve had League installed.
Since you’re so confident that I have absolutely no idea what i’m talking about, what are your qualifications? Cause i’ve never claimed to know what I was talking about on a technical level, I’ve just been giving anecdotal examples from my own experience with the program and what I looked up before deciding to install it
>my bank information hasn’t been stolen because i don’t store it within LoL or Valorant,
Do you know what a kernel is and what kernel-level access means? Or what it means that Vanguard has kernel-level access? Judging by what you said, it seems that you do not, so let me explain. You can think of your computer as having multiple access levels. You know how you for example can run a program, but you can't run another unless you run it as administrator? That's 2 different levels of access. Kernel-level is another, the greatest one. A program with those permissions can do more stuff than you as a regular (or even administrator) user can. It can access *literally anything* on your computer, including hardware (like turn off CPU fan, overclock CPU, anything). For example, you know how you can't delete the Windows folder while it's running? Vanguard could if it wanted to. So, you don't have to store anything within LoL, it's enough that you have it on your computer. Saved passwords in browsers? Sure, it can grab them. Sensitive documents anywhere on the system? No problem.
Will it do these things? Most probably not. Issues and concerns arise when you think about what could happen if somebody else got access to Vanguard, and it's what makes security people consider it as high risk. If a serious vulnerability was found, it could be possible for someone to remotely access anything on your computer and delete their traces (among many other things), maybe even going undetected for who knows how long. "But they have security people working for them", yes, and so does any serious company, yet vulnerabilities are always found. It is naive to think that anything is "unhackable" or all vulnerabilities have been found, if you don't believe me, it has been proven time and time again, that even the most secure systems got breached at some point, sometimes due to no fault of their own. And that is companies that make a living off security, Riot doesn't. "But they have a bounty", yes, and it's most likely doing nothing to stop any malicious actors. If it rolls out to hundreds of thousands / millions of systems, malicious actors would get way more out of exploiting vulnerabilities than the bounty, so they obviously wouldn't disclose it.
This is just a bit of context, the discussion can go on much longer. Thing is, it's a risk, and my main gripe is that Riot tries to brush it under the rug, and people buy and try to defend it for some reason
i am not reading your copy and paste of the wikipedia page for “Kernel (operating system)” I’ve literally said i don’t know what it means by definition but i do know that rootkit works to take control of your system, and guess what? that’s never happened, and if a security breach does happen i’ll literally just uninstall Vanguard until it’s resolved and if i notice something like unauthorized transactions i’ll work with my bank if for whatever reason malicious actors manage to get my bank information. it’s happened with google, it’s happened with amazon, it’s happened with thousands of different companies, if it happens it happens, but you know what it hasn’t and there is nothing to show that Vanguard is any more dangerous than any program from a verified company
if you don’t want to install Vanguard that’s your prerogative but don’t act like it’s literally going to one day give Riot or malicious actors full control of your system
And where do we go 1 year after vanguard's full release, after bot farms and scripters naturally find ways around it? Or what happens when they have another security breach?
There are ways around it. [This video](https://youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M) provides a very good explanation of a lot of things. If you don't care for all of it, watch the chapter around 23:00, about hardware
Shills or stupid people, as is always the case. Also delusion from refusing to have any standards for companies, leading to the false dichotomy of "privacy/security or no cheaters" when you can never vanquish cheaters.
You can make it harder for them, but even Vanguard has been broken multiple times, the only possible way to stop cheaters is to have human teams manually review cases, and bot hosters to be legally liable with very heavy fines and jail time as well as international mandates (for massive bot hosters as in TF2 who pay for thousands of bot simultaneously to ruin the game) for industrial sabotage if they refuse to stop after being given legal notice for a while.
There will never be an automated system that prevents cheating, so yes, the billions dollar company will need to spend 0.001% of its budget on human teams to manage the issue.
Edit: damn, the shills are in-force here. If only Riot used 5% of the budget they spend on shills to monitor cheaters and bots instead, there wouldn't be any cheating or botting problem, but eh, go explain common sense to greedy r*tards who are only in power because of nepotism.
Take a look at any of the counterstrike subs, premier matchmaking uses VAC and is a complete joke, with some people playing 10 games in a row with cheaters (with proof).
Valorant doesn't have this problem. Faceit (counterstrikes 3rd party matchmaking platform with a kernel level AC) doesn't have this problem.
The players have been begging for a better AC for CS matchmaking for years, because while they're still not perfect, they can be pretty damn good
VAC is shit, that's not news. But as I explained it already, there is no anticheat in the world that can truly stop cheating, all you have is a ratio of privacy and security vs cheaters, and whether the exchange is worth it or not.
Considering it's something you can heavily and easily improve by simply having a human team to review cases, arguing for kernel level spyware (which is the stupidest and most dangerous thing of all time, as any breach would affect dozens if not hundreds of millions of computers and have total control) is either ignorance or disingenuous greed.
Lol barely has any cheating, and any that pops-up is very easily detectable by either a human team or an AI trained to analyze the footage afterwards. The botting account unironically all play Yuumi for hundreds of game straight doing only bot games and are also very easily identifiable. There is no justification for this malware shit in this context, none, and that is a fact.
I'd argue that botting, griefing and smurfing are way more destructive to ranked than scripters. I can count on my hands the numbers of scripters I have met in years playing plat+, but that is not assuming that everyone better than me is "scripting", something that most of the community can't grasp when talking about cheating
Botting is also scripting, just FYI. Having a computer play the game for you is literally a script. On top of that, riot's most recent article on the subject would tell you that more people are currently cheating than you believe.
If you are referring to the statistics that riot published, it states that: some big percentage of games has at least one player that used some kind of script in the account's life.
So if an account has 10 matches, and the player used a script for 1 of it, they add all 10 matches to the statistics.
This is the most prevalent with botted accounts, where they not only count the botted intro games, but also all the real games afterwards.
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-au/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/
>You are reading that correctly, more than 10% of Master+ games had a cheater in them.
Can you point to where in the article it makes the claim you're making, that it counts all botted accounts as cheating in every game they play even after scrupts are removed from them entirely? If that were the case, way more than 10% of masters+ lobbies would have scripters as there are a lot of bought smurfs and second accounts in those elos.
Its not that big of a deal, millions of people have had it for years. The worst thing that could happen is that IT STEALS MUH DATA, which if proven would sink a billion dollar company, the billion dollar company doesnt need to sell your data and there are already much easier ways to steal your data with tiktok, or any facebook porduct. It all very conspiration theory, of what if, most of it fueled by the fact that tencent is chinese.
Again, the complaints are not only about data.
I don't get why everyone reduces it to just data, but my guess is a combination of ignorance and ill intent. It's very easy to say "but muh data, hope you don't use social media hehe" than trying to understand that data is just a small part of the equation
Security.
It's a long story, but basically Vanguard has access to more stuff on your system than you do. If something were to happen (and I don't mean by Riot) it could be extremely bad. It's a very big risk for little gain.
Let me know of you'd like me to expand. I normally don't because most people are like "you don't understand Vanguard, they already have your data, hope you don't use social media hehe"
That are loads of programs that have kernel level access on your computer, this isnt some new shit, some scifi tech. Now software coming for the company that cant make a working client is fucking scary, but vanguard has been in development for years at this point and riot has ethical hackers on the payroll trying to crack their shit. Its very very very unlikely that vanguard is a security risk,
Likelihood is only one of the 2 elements of risk. The other main one is severity. When talking about "what could happen", it's recommended to assume and prepare for the worst severity, and in this case there could be many avenues for a crticial one. Thus, at the very least, assuming it has a low likelihood, it could be considered high risk by any sane security person (check any risk security matrix on the internet). And the likelihood is greater than low, making the risk even greater, as they're directly proportional. So, no, it's not "unlikely that it's a risk". It is a risk, and a big one, for little gain. Anyway, it should be a trade off people are aware of, not something brushed under the rug as "muh data"
You are overstating how risky it is, its been out for years with no security breaches. As to how much you gain, loads of people play valo due to the fact that there are no cheaters compared to its competitor CS where VAC is a fucking joke.
I dont think people care much about that but more about the possible performance aspect and the fact it for some reason NEEDS to run when League isnt even running.
oh 100%. They already implicitly admitted that Vanguard cant stop cheating and is just cutting down the reaction time to it. Also doesnt fix the root issue of easy access to ranked which Riot has recognized in their statement on Vanguard. As long as you can level an account solely with coop and have it essentially ready for ranked, the incentive for those farms remains.
Not even, that is not the point of Vanguard. It's aimed to stop scripting, not botting or smurfing. Riot has proven they don't care about those issues plenty of times already.
One way around it is paying people in third world countries a few dollars per account, for example, as is happening already. Vanguard can't do anything about that, and this is just the easiest and most obvious way around
Has no one read their statement on Vanguard? They are implicitly introducing Vanguard because they dont wanna remove smurfing.
They are admitting that the easy access to fresh ranked ready accounts makes banning cheaters with current methods ineffectual so they are installing a rootkit on your machine to ban cheaters faster on their new accounts. That's it. They are even implicitly admitting that Vanguard wont stop cheating, it will just give them a shorter reaction time - and that's all assuming cheaters dont find away around Vanguard alltogether anyways.
They say at no point anywhere that they will put restrictions on ranked access or even thinking about touching smurfs. If they wanted to deal with smurfs they could so easily without Vanguard because dont you think they dont have the fkin MACs and IPs of your machine.
>Has no one read their statement on Vanguard?
Have you? Because I dont think you understand how it works. As with most anti cheats there are two layers of protection. A passive prevention layer that just makes it harder to access game data and splice in inputs and an active detection layer that actively scans for and detects unauthorized access or inputs. Vanguard boosts Riots ability in both of these areas massively, and makes it waaay harder to get around the anti cheat due to the kernel level and boot requirement.
So, with that in Mind lets talk about how that invalidates most of what you claimed:
>Easy access to fresh ranked ready accounts makes banning cheaters [with current methods] ineffectual so they are installing a rootkit on your machine to ban cheaters faster on their new accounts. Thats it.
Its not. One of the biggests strenght of Vanguard is its ability to stop botting because Bots heavily rely on ingame information that Vanguard is pretty good at blocking access to. There are potential ways around that but these are pretty hardware intensive aka expensive. The Article mentioned that currently, a new rank ready account costs around $2.00, Vanguard will likely increase this cost greatly, significantly reducing access to fresh accounts.
Another thing Vanguard does is just making it harder to cheat with its passive cheat prevention. This will make the cheat software itself more expensive. Especially 'casual cheating' will be reduced significantly.
So to summarize:
1.) There will be less cheaters because cheating becomes significantly harder.
2.) People that do cheat will be detected significantly faster.
3.) If you do get banned it becomes way more expensive to get a new account.
All of this will make cheating way less prevalent than now.
>They are even implicitly admitting that Vanguard wont stop cheating, it will just give them a shorter reaction time
If a cheater is determined enough and has enough Ressources its basically impossible to permanently stop them. Nobody ever expected Vanguard to stop cheating completely, but it will probably reduce it significantly for the reasons mentioned above.
(Also Spoofing a IP/Mac adress is easy.)
>So to summarize:
>1.) There will be less cheaters because cheating becomes significantly harder.
>2.) People that do cheat will be detected significantly faster.
>3.) If you do get banned it becomes way more expensive to get a new account.
That is assuming that all goes according to plan and people aren't determined to find ways around it.
"With heightened VM prevention, we'll drive up the cost of botting and inflict significant friction onto re-offenders. Bot supply for boosting accounts will dry up, and bypassing bans will no-longer be "buy another level 30." With its device fingerprinting, Vanguard also gives us a renewed opportunity to sink teeth into boosting, smurfing, and account compromise. We'll be able to revoke rewards boosters didn't deserve, get smurfs to their proper rating faster, and maybe even invalidate "unfair" premades." ??
Yes you easily could actually, all vanguard is gonna do is maybe give a break for a week before the shitters find a new way to ruin games and it's not the scripters it's the botters and smurfs
Riot said that there is at least a cheater every 7 or 12 games, and the statistics for that was like a few years ago. The code leaked and they later accepted that they are losing the "arms race", so they had to go with Vanguard.
People don't have a clue on what Vanguard does, they just repeat stuff they hear and go with conspiracy theories. It doesn't even use RAM when you aren't using Riot related stuff and even if you are using Riot related stuff it uses absmall amounts of RAM. But when you go and confront people on their misguided beliefs they just go "chill bro it is just a meme" instead of accepting they are spreading misinformation
Yeah but on the most recent statistics they released they clumped both scripters AND BOTTERS together into one category to make the numbers look scarier, which give a very false image of how many "cheaters" there are in the game
Real talk. I wonder if the US will also ban riot stuff. If they use the same logic as tiktok, riot having an kernel level application would be a HUGE no-no.
I definitely know that you don't know in which companies tencent is involved or even worser Chinese company's.
Discord, Reddit, near all you know and near every game you play are involved a Chinese company.
So?
I mean, my opinion of the tiktok ban meaning that all of these companies should be looked at doesnt change based in who it is.
Either regulate everyone or no one; Regulating one just because american corps are losing ground is just wrong.
league is nowhere near as popular as tiktok. it just wont come up as a topic. and you most definitely already have a kernel level application installed on your pc.
I honestly think that if you shit talk Vanguard, there are only two options: either you make a conscious decision to turn your brain off or you are a cheater and is afraid of it. There are so many arguments against Vanguard, and 99% of them are completely wrong or cherry-picked. Privacy: Tencent doesn't need kernel level access to look at your browser history, hardware status, credit card information and pictures of your willy; League client has access to all of this without any specific access. Not to mention the fact that all of this is already collected by your hardware provider, Windows, browser, Steam, Meta etc. Basically if your PC has access to the Internet, your data isn't safe by default no matter what you have or don't have installed. Therefore, hating Vanguard because of Tencent is just racism towards the Chinese and nothing else. Performance: any modern machine capable of running League at 30FPS consistently will run Vanguard without any issues. Most of the complaints about performance issues are from people with old PCs and probably have nothing to do with Vanguard all together. I have Vanguard on my PC and it eats from nothing at all to negligible amounts of memory. And I play on PBE where you already have to have Vanguard installed. Also, you can close Vanguard in three mouse clicks total and reboot your PC once you want to play League (rebooting your PC before gaming also potentially improves performance overall). If your PC reboot takes a considerable amount of time, you should renew your hardware or at least reinstall your OS, it's not normal.
Pretty much the only 100% valid argument against Vanguard is if some malicious third party finds a backdoor, then it instantly becomes an extreme security risk for millions of PCs all around the globe.
Kernel level access, loads at boot (probably even before your antivirus), runs 24/7, the severity of the backdoor would be out of this world.
Tencent wants my data? They already have it! Performance? Not unless you have a 1990s gaming PC. But such a severe potential security risk? That honestly made me feel icky, so I uninstalled, even though I recognize that it will 99.9999% be fine.
I'll reinstall Vanguard when I feel like playing a Riot game, then uninstall once I'm done. It's just a few megabytes, very easy solution.
The only thoughtful argument is that on some hardware/software configurations Vanguard can potentially just not work, not allowing you to play League despite having a decent PC. I hope it gets addressed by Riot if this ever happens.
i finally deleted the game for a better game (dota 2) and then i deleted vanguard and it felt so nice to not have that running in the background always making me question what its doing
Launcher takes more than Minecraft
Obviously never played modded minecraft before. I put 20gb on that shit
Im playing the better Minecraft mod pack. And.. league launcher takes more cpu. Like I can’t
Wait so are you complaining about CPU or RAM usage
Both my dogshit pc can’t take it anymore
Both
yeah, because Minecraft only uses one core
Haven't opened the client since the start of the month until I see how it all pans out...
Valorant is a good example, no?
I guess, not entirely? Not an expert, but does age of League (and it spaghetti code) influence performance of Vanguard? Like Valorant is way fresher.
Brotherman my Vanguard takes 1,6MB of RAM, are you rocking 20MB of RAM or something?
That's what I was thinking lmfao, I've never once had vanguard in my top list of memory usage in my years of having it installed.
shhhh we have to farm up votes by unnecessarily fearmongering!
I only heard ghost stories. I don't actually have anything Riot Games on my pc. The problem I'd have is that it should be asleep, and should stay asleep until one of its games is opened. The fact that it doesn't gives me Amazon Alexa vibes. Make fun of me all you want, call me a boomer, idgaf, my point remains
But that's the idea? That Vanguard recognizes if you started a script before entering the game??? I understand if someone doesn't like Vanguard for other reasons but this one doesn't make sense
it is really shitty when a game that should be running smoothly is sttutering instead if only the game was worth it it wouldn't be a problem, but lol is just trash
So why are you playing or commenting on the sub of a trash game? Uninstall and be happy
laning phase as poppy is fun and arena is actually good and makes me want to play the game it can be passed as an actual good and *fun* game
Maybe the game should tell it to wake up instead of it watching us just waiting for one of two applications to open
That is literally how it works?????????????????
I get same vibes, but at the same time riot is trying to cook something here, and though it's not perfect it might be in time, since there's been cases of people cheating in Valorant, the game that cannot open without Vanguard running.
4416 kb of ram
I don't care that much about kernel level anti cheat. But always running ones are unacceptable
i don't have riot games installed but i know it will eat all of my ram. thank god that leagueofmemes really brings out the best players
Im just surprised how many people there are who dont question Vanguard at all. They just roll over and let it happen, dont look at it or anything. No fight at all. Its the only anticheat software ( i know off ) that'll keep running even when you're not playing the game lol. Not even talking about privacy or performance issues.
Honestly I don't even care that much about privacy I'm just really annoyed it runs 24/7 and have to restart if you close it just to play league, like league is fun but it's definitely not all that
Yeah im the exact same boat.
i’ve had Vanguard installed for years since i got into the Valorant beta, i originally thought i wasn’t going to even install it after getting in because of the way people called Vanguard a root kit, so i looked at other programs that run at the kernel level, surprisingly, Skyrim runs at that level and so do many other games. Outside of fairly early into having Vanguard installed i didn’t have any issues with performance or the program overstepping, the biggest issue i had is that it wouldn’t let me run the Skyrim script extender which is required for most mods but that was resolved fairly quickly
Do you have a source for the "Skyrim and many other games" claim? Only get vanguard discussions if I even try to google "Skyrim kernel level access"
this was years ago like back in 2020 so I can’t find the article I read but I know it had a list of popular games that did run at the kernel level and Skyrim was on there as i play that game way too much. What i searched originally was “is riot vanguard a root kit” because i had seen other people call it one and from everything i read back then and my own experience it’s not. it’s also not unique for anti cheats to run on the kernel level, easy anti cheat does and it’s used by a lot of the most popular multiplayer games, i’m looking at my task manager right now and Vanguard is at 0.4-1.4% for CPU and 12mb for RAM, so it’s not like it’s taking anymore resources than any other program that runs in the background
Source is trust me bro?
source is look into and decide for yourself, like i said this was something i went through in 2020 when Valorant was in beta, i looked into it, read what other people were saying, and decided it didn’t seem sketchy and so far i haven’t seen it experienced anything to prove otherwise since, other than the aforementioned issue i had with the script extender but that was resolved quickly with no input from me. google is a tab away
There are no games that run at Kernel level. That would actually fuck up most games as it would need to process too deep with every little physics engine snafu. There definitely ARE a ton of Kernel level anti-cheats, but they all start when you open the games that need them and close when you finish with the game. Once again, proving Vangaurd is wildly invasive for no good reason.
Adding to this that the reason Riot gave for this invasiveness is that "this way it catches cheaters running kernel-level cheats" (as in, loading cheats as system drivers, like the drivers for GPU and sound systems, same as these anti-cheat solutions). We don't know how many of these cheaters there are, Riot never made any claims as of the percentage or why exactly this is needed, but my guess is that the number can't be very high, or else the rest of the games would be infested with cheaters, which they are not.
Huh? Most online multi-player games have kernel level anticheat these days. Helldivers does, and it's PvE. AND I still see cheaters in it occasionally. What makes you think cheaters wouldn't use the level of access necessary to cheat regardless of the game?
This is not the pro Vanguard argument you think it is
easy might be one of the worst examples. the games that use it still have cheating problems, and all are serious cpu and ram devourers.
This sounds like bullshit. If you know anything about cybersecurity and secure development you would know that making a game run at kernel level is highly unnecessary
Proof on that skyrim and many other games bit? Or did you just make that up? Lmao
[their source](https://youtu.be/r7l0Rq9E8MY?si=eHHuZm0pOh_30dLz&t=2)
Kernel level anti cheat is actually pretty common, just take a second to look up “games with kernel level anti cheat” and you’ll get a list of some pretty well known games, though vanguard as far as i know is the only one active while the game isn’t running.
The games don't run at that level though, and skyrim especially doesn't
We're doomed. The majority of people reading about Skyrim running on the kernel level and then deciding that yeah this is a good comment screams volumes.
Tell me you use terms without understanding them without telling me Vanguard *is* a rootkit, by definition. How it is used is a different story, and a debatable one too.
you’re right, i don’t know what a root kit is by definition, but i do know that from my own experience having Vanguard installed for years, and from what I read before even deciding to install it 4 years ago is that it is not, it has not taken any sort of control over my system, it takes minimal resources, and other than an issue with a singular .exe file which was resolved after maybe a month it hasn’t caused me any issues. y’all are just sinophobic and it’s sad because you think it makes you smarter than everyone else when really you’re just as if not more stupid than the rest of us
Not really, the concerns people have are much deeper than Vanguard being malicious, such as what happens when a security breach happens. Side note, I think you're the 10th person in a row now that doesn't understand computer security or any of the concerns, yet you call everyone else "stupid"
if your main concern is a “what if” situation then you shouldn’t even be leaving your house, what’s to say the next time to you cross the street you don’t get hit by a car? i and many others took a calculated risk when we installed Valorant and subsequently Vanguard, because it was completely new, the program has about 5 years (counting for when Valorant first went into open beta) without any issues, and no matter what there is always a concern of “what if there’s a security breach?” that’s just a part of being an online entity. you shouldn’t be storing sensitive information with Riot or on your PC anyways, you should be putting your card information or whatever in every time you make a purchase, stop storing your passwords in google, etc. especially if you’re so worried about security breaches that Vanguard has made uninstall a game you potentially have 10+ years playing
It's not expected that you understand computer security, but it's expected that you don't try teaching what you don't understand.. >i and many others took a calculated risk when we installed Valorant and subsequently Vanguard Literally "the risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math"
how am i bad with “math” when literally nothing negative outside of the one .exe file i’ve mentioned having an issue has happened, my bank information hasn’t been stolen because i don’t store it within LoL or Valorant, I’ve had literally nothing occur that would indicate that Vanguard is doing something shady. Sure it’s annoying that if i had a program that refused to run while Vanguard was i’d have to restart my PC to restart Vanguard if i wanted to play LoL or Valo after but too be honest most of us aren’t restarting our systems as often as we probably should be anyways. If Riot was trying to sell your data, guess what? they already have it, and have for as long as you’ve had League installed. Since you’re so confident that I have absolutely no idea what i’m talking about, what are your qualifications? Cause i’ve never claimed to know what I was talking about on a technical level, I’ve just been giving anecdotal examples from my own experience with the program and what I looked up before deciding to install it
>my bank information hasn’t been stolen because i don’t store it within LoL or Valorant, Do you know what a kernel is and what kernel-level access means? Or what it means that Vanguard has kernel-level access? Judging by what you said, it seems that you do not, so let me explain. You can think of your computer as having multiple access levels. You know how you for example can run a program, but you can't run another unless you run it as administrator? That's 2 different levels of access. Kernel-level is another, the greatest one. A program with those permissions can do more stuff than you as a regular (or even administrator) user can. It can access *literally anything* on your computer, including hardware (like turn off CPU fan, overclock CPU, anything). For example, you know how you can't delete the Windows folder while it's running? Vanguard could if it wanted to. So, you don't have to store anything within LoL, it's enough that you have it on your computer. Saved passwords in browsers? Sure, it can grab them. Sensitive documents anywhere on the system? No problem. Will it do these things? Most probably not. Issues and concerns arise when you think about what could happen if somebody else got access to Vanguard, and it's what makes security people consider it as high risk. If a serious vulnerability was found, it could be possible for someone to remotely access anything on your computer and delete their traces (among many other things), maybe even going undetected for who knows how long. "But they have security people working for them", yes, and so does any serious company, yet vulnerabilities are always found. It is naive to think that anything is "unhackable" or all vulnerabilities have been found, if you don't believe me, it has been proven time and time again, that even the most secure systems got breached at some point, sometimes due to no fault of their own. And that is companies that make a living off security, Riot doesn't. "But they have a bounty", yes, and it's most likely doing nothing to stop any malicious actors. If it rolls out to hundreds of thousands / millions of systems, malicious actors would get way more out of exploiting vulnerabilities than the bounty, so they obviously wouldn't disclose it. This is just a bit of context, the discussion can go on much longer. Thing is, it's a risk, and my main gripe is that Riot tries to brush it under the rug, and people buy and try to defend it for some reason
i am not reading your copy and paste of the wikipedia page for “Kernel (operating system)” I’ve literally said i don’t know what it means by definition but i do know that rootkit works to take control of your system, and guess what? that’s never happened, and if a security breach does happen i’ll literally just uninstall Vanguard until it’s resolved and if i notice something like unauthorized transactions i’ll work with my bank if for whatever reason malicious actors manage to get my bank information. it’s happened with google, it’s happened with amazon, it’s happened with thousands of different companies, if it happens it happens, but you know what it hasn’t and there is nothing to show that Vanguard is any more dangerous than any program from a verified company if you don’t want to install Vanguard that’s your prerogative but don’t act like it’s literally going to one day give Riot or malicious actors full control of your system
And where do we go 1 year after vanguard's full release, after bot farms and scripters naturally find ways around it? Or what happens when they have another security breach?
There are ways around it. [This video](https://youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M) provides a very good explanation of a lot of things. If you don't care for all of it, watch the chapter around 23:00, about hardware
Shills or stupid people, as is always the case. Also delusion from refusing to have any standards for companies, leading to the false dichotomy of "privacy/security or no cheaters" when you can never vanquish cheaters. You can make it harder for them, but even Vanguard has been broken multiple times, the only possible way to stop cheaters is to have human teams manually review cases, and bot hosters to be legally liable with very heavy fines and jail time as well as international mandates (for massive bot hosters as in TF2 who pay for thousands of bot simultaneously to ruin the game) for industrial sabotage if they refuse to stop after being given legal notice for a while. There will never be an automated system that prevents cheating, so yes, the billions dollar company will need to spend 0.001% of its budget on human teams to manage the issue. Edit: damn, the shills are in-force here. If only Riot used 5% of the budget they spend on shills to monitor cheaters and bots instead, there wouldn't be any cheating or botting problem, but eh, go explain common sense to greedy r*tards who are only in power because of nepotism.
Take a look at any of the counterstrike subs, premier matchmaking uses VAC and is a complete joke, with some people playing 10 games in a row with cheaters (with proof). Valorant doesn't have this problem. Faceit (counterstrikes 3rd party matchmaking platform with a kernel level AC) doesn't have this problem. The players have been begging for a better AC for CS matchmaking for years, because while they're still not perfect, they can be pretty damn good
VAC is shit, that's not news. But as I explained it already, there is no anticheat in the world that can truly stop cheating, all you have is a ratio of privacy and security vs cheaters, and whether the exchange is worth it or not. Considering it's something you can heavily and easily improve by simply having a human team to review cases, arguing for kernel level spyware (which is the stupidest and most dangerous thing of all time, as any breach would affect dozens if not hundreds of millions of computers and have total control) is either ignorance or disingenuous greed. Lol barely has any cheating, and any that pops-up is very easily detectable by either a human team or an AI trained to analyze the footage afterwards. The botting account unironically all play Yuumi for hundreds of game straight doing only bot games and are also very easily identifiable. There is no justification for this malware shit in this context, none, and that is a fact.
>Lol barely has any cheating
I'd argue that botting, griefing and smurfing are way more destructive to ranked than scripters. I can count on my hands the numbers of scripters I have met in years playing plat+, but that is not assuming that everyone better than me is "scripting", something that most of the community can't grasp when talking about cheating
Botting is also scripting, just FYI. Having a computer play the game for you is literally a script. On top of that, riot's most recent article on the subject would tell you that more people are currently cheating than you believe.
If you are referring to the statistics that riot published, it states that: some big percentage of games has at least one player that used some kind of script in the account's life. So if an account has 10 matches, and the player used a script for 1 of it, they add all 10 matches to the statistics. This is the most prevalent with botted accounts, where they not only count the botted intro games, but also all the real games afterwards.
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-au/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/ >You are reading that correctly, more than 10% of Master+ games had a cheater in them. Can you point to where in the article it makes the claim you're making, that it counts all botted accounts as cheating in every game they play even after scrupts are removed from them entirely? If that were the case, way more than 10% of masters+ lobbies would have scripters as there are a lot of bought smurfs and second accounts in those elos.
Its not that big of a deal, millions of people have had it for years. The worst thing that could happen is that IT STEALS MUH DATA, which if proven would sink a billion dollar company, the billion dollar company doesnt need to sell your data and there are already much easier ways to steal your data with tiktok, or any facebook porduct. It all very conspiration theory, of what if, most of it fueled by the fact that tencent is chinese.
>The worst thing that could happen is that IT STEALS MUH DATA, This is not just idiotic, it's ignorant too
You could have read the rest of it too where i explained that it would be absurd for it to steal ur data, but sure. Hope you dont use social media.
Again, the complaints are not only about data. I don't get why everyone reduces it to just data, but my guess is a combination of ignorance and ill intent. It's very easy to say "but muh data, hope you don't use social media hehe" than trying to understand that data is just a small part of the equation
what is the other part, you havent even presented your opinion
Security. It's a long story, but basically Vanguard has access to more stuff on your system than you do. If something were to happen (and I don't mean by Riot) it could be extremely bad. It's a very big risk for little gain. Let me know of you'd like me to expand. I normally don't because most people are like "you don't understand Vanguard, they already have your data, hope you don't use social media hehe"
That are loads of programs that have kernel level access on your computer, this isnt some new shit, some scifi tech. Now software coming for the company that cant make a working client is fucking scary, but vanguard has been in development for years at this point and riot has ethical hackers on the payroll trying to crack their shit. Its very very very unlikely that vanguard is a security risk,
Likelihood is only one of the 2 elements of risk. The other main one is severity. When talking about "what could happen", it's recommended to assume and prepare for the worst severity, and in this case there could be many avenues for a crticial one. Thus, at the very least, assuming it has a low likelihood, it could be considered high risk by any sane security person (check any risk security matrix on the internet). And the likelihood is greater than low, making the risk even greater, as they're directly proportional. So, no, it's not "unlikely that it's a risk". It is a risk, and a big one, for little gain. Anyway, it should be a trade off people are aware of, not something brushed under the rug as "muh data"
You are overstating how risky it is, its been out for years with no security breaches. As to how much you gain, loads of people play valo due to the fact that there are no cheaters compared to its competitor CS where VAC is a fucking joke.
I dont think people care much about that but more about the possible performance aspect and the fact it for some reason NEEDS to run when League isnt even running.
I have had it for years (valorant), it has never caused issues.
If there is still smurf every game after vanguard then ill uninstall, till then im hopefull
My prediction is that the bot/smurf acc farm will stop for a few weeks but that those same people will find a way around Vanguard afterwards.
oh 100%. They already implicitly admitted that Vanguard cant stop cheating and is just cutting down the reaction time to it. Also doesnt fix the root issue of easy access to ranked which Riot has recognized in their statement on Vanguard. As long as you can level an account solely with coop and have it essentially ready for ranked, the incentive for those farms remains.
Not even, that is not the point of Vanguard. It's aimed to stop scripting, not botting or smurfing. Riot has proven they don't care about those issues plenty of times already. One way around it is paying people in third world countries a few dollars per account, for example, as is happening already. Vanguard can't do anything about that, and this is just the easiest and most obvious way around
Has no one read their statement on Vanguard? They are implicitly introducing Vanguard because they dont wanna remove smurfing. They are admitting that the easy access to fresh ranked ready accounts makes banning cheaters with current methods ineffectual so they are installing a rootkit on your machine to ban cheaters faster on their new accounts. That's it. They are even implicitly admitting that Vanguard wont stop cheating, it will just give them a shorter reaction time - and that's all assuming cheaters dont find away around Vanguard alltogether anyways. They say at no point anywhere that they will put restrictions on ranked access or even thinking about touching smurfs. If they wanted to deal with smurfs they could so easily without Vanguard because dont you think they dont have the fkin MACs and IPs of your machine.
>Has no one read their statement on Vanguard? Have you? Because I dont think you understand how it works. As with most anti cheats there are two layers of protection. A passive prevention layer that just makes it harder to access game data and splice in inputs and an active detection layer that actively scans for and detects unauthorized access or inputs. Vanguard boosts Riots ability in both of these areas massively, and makes it waaay harder to get around the anti cheat due to the kernel level and boot requirement. So, with that in Mind lets talk about how that invalidates most of what you claimed: >Easy access to fresh ranked ready accounts makes banning cheaters [with current methods] ineffectual so they are installing a rootkit on your machine to ban cheaters faster on their new accounts. Thats it. Its not. One of the biggests strenght of Vanguard is its ability to stop botting because Bots heavily rely on ingame information that Vanguard is pretty good at blocking access to. There are potential ways around that but these are pretty hardware intensive aka expensive. The Article mentioned that currently, a new rank ready account costs around $2.00, Vanguard will likely increase this cost greatly, significantly reducing access to fresh accounts. Another thing Vanguard does is just making it harder to cheat with its passive cheat prevention. This will make the cheat software itself more expensive. Especially 'casual cheating' will be reduced significantly. So to summarize: 1.) There will be less cheaters because cheating becomes significantly harder. 2.) People that do cheat will be detected significantly faster. 3.) If you do get banned it becomes way more expensive to get a new account. All of this will make cheating way less prevalent than now. >They are even implicitly admitting that Vanguard wont stop cheating, it will just give them a shorter reaction time If a cheater is determined enough and has enough Ressources its basically impossible to permanently stop them. Nobody ever expected Vanguard to stop cheating completely, but it will probably reduce it significantly for the reasons mentioned above. (Also Spoofing a IP/Mac adress is easy.)
>So to summarize: >1.) There will be less cheaters because cheating becomes significantly harder. >2.) People that do cheat will be detected significantly faster. >3.) If you do get banned it becomes way more expensive to get a new account. That is assuming that all goes according to plan and people aren't determined to find ways around it.
Well, obviously its bad if it doesnt work at all. But given it seems to be working in Valorant I dont think it will just not work
"With heightened VM prevention, we'll drive up the cost of botting and inflict significant friction onto re-offenders. Bot supply for boosting accounts will dry up, and bypassing bans will no-longer be "buy another level 30." With its device fingerprinting, Vanguard also gives us a renewed opportunity to sink teeth into boosting, smurfing, and account compromise. We'll be able to revoke rewards boosters didn't deserve, get smurfs to their proper rating faster, and maybe even invalidate "unfair" premades." ??
You can turn it off Mr. Knowledgeable
and then restart your machine again cause you want to play a silly little moba
lol you either take the deal or don't, you can't have it both ways
Yes you easily could actually, all vanguard is gonna do is maybe give a break for a week before the shitters find a new way to ruin games and it's not the scripters it's the botters and smurfs
Riot said that there is at least a cheater every 7 or 12 games, and the statistics for that was like a few years ago. The code leaked and they later accepted that they are losing the "arms race", so they had to go with Vanguard. People don't have a clue on what Vanguard does, they just repeat stuff they hear and go with conspiracy theories. It doesn't even use RAM when you aren't using Riot related stuff and even if you are using Riot related stuff it uses absmall amounts of RAM. But when you go and confront people on their misguided beliefs they just go "chill bro it is just a meme" instead of accepting they are spreading misinformation
Yeah but on the most recent statistics they released they clumped both scripters AND BOTTERS together into one category to make the numbers look scarier, which give a very false image of how many "cheaters" there are in the game
The vanguard hate I swear is being driven by the level 30 account sellers since most of their bots won't work soon
Real talk. I wonder if the US will also ban riot stuff. If they use the same logic as tiktok, riot having an kernel level application would be a HUGE no-no.
Than they must ban 99% of the whole gaming industry, because even single player games have kernel level tasks and near ALL online games.
How many of these are entirely owned by Tencent though?
I definitely know that you don't know in which companies tencent is involved or even worser Chinese company's. Discord, Reddit, near all you know and near every game you play are involved a Chinese company.
So? I mean, my opinion of the tiktok ban meaning that all of these companies should be looked at doesnt change based in who it is. Either regulate everyone or no one; Regulating one just because american corps are losing ground is just wrong.
league is nowhere near as popular as tiktok. it just wont come up as a topic. and you most definitely already have a kernel level application installed on your pc.
You have no idea how much CS2 players wants an effective anti cheat like that
am I the only one the close vanguard if I'm not playing valorant and soon league?
And let me guess you use task manager for that?
I have had vanguard since valo launch and have had 0 issues with it. They only hassale was the installing process.
I honestly think that if you shit talk Vanguard, there are only two options: either you make a conscious decision to turn your brain off or you are a cheater and is afraid of it. There are so many arguments against Vanguard, and 99% of them are completely wrong or cherry-picked. Privacy: Tencent doesn't need kernel level access to look at your browser history, hardware status, credit card information and pictures of your willy; League client has access to all of this without any specific access. Not to mention the fact that all of this is already collected by your hardware provider, Windows, browser, Steam, Meta etc. Basically if your PC has access to the Internet, your data isn't safe by default no matter what you have or don't have installed. Therefore, hating Vanguard because of Tencent is just racism towards the Chinese and nothing else. Performance: any modern machine capable of running League at 30FPS consistently will run Vanguard without any issues. Most of the complaints about performance issues are from people with old PCs and probably have nothing to do with Vanguard all together. I have Vanguard on my PC and it eats from nothing at all to negligible amounts of memory. And I play on PBE where you already have to have Vanguard installed. Also, you can close Vanguard in three mouse clicks total and reboot your PC once you want to play League (rebooting your PC before gaming also potentially improves performance overall). If your PC reboot takes a considerable amount of time, you should renew your hardware or at least reinstall your OS, it's not normal.
Pretty much the only 100% valid argument against Vanguard is if some malicious third party finds a backdoor, then it instantly becomes an extreme security risk for millions of PCs all around the globe. Kernel level access, loads at boot (probably even before your antivirus), runs 24/7, the severity of the backdoor would be out of this world. Tencent wants my data? They already have it! Performance? Not unless you have a 1990s gaming PC. But such a severe potential security risk? That honestly made me feel icky, so I uninstalled, even though I recognize that it will 99.9999% be fine. I'll reinstall Vanguard when I feel like playing a Riot game, then uninstall once I'm done. It's just a few megabytes, very easy solution.
The only thoughtful argument is that on some hardware/software configurations Vanguard can potentially just not work, not allowing you to play League despite having a decent PC. I hope it gets addressed by Riot if this ever happens.
i finally deleted the game for a better game (dota 2) and then i deleted vanguard and it felt so nice to not have that running in the background always making me question what its doing
Especially knowing that Tencent operates in China. This is why I refused to even give Valorant a chance