why riot's new anti-cheat is a HUGE problem.

the biggest issue with vanguard is how it actually runs, there are plently more kernel-level anticheat solutions out there, but vanguard continues running even if you do not have the game open, this is a serious security risk, with things like easy anti-cheat at the very least hackers can only exploit the kernel level driver when the game is running, however with vanguard its always exploitable, which makes the problem even bigger.

these companies need to find a better way of cheat prevention, and seeing as its impractical to make it a client side measure then i think something in the API or carefully crafted game mechanics, a definite feature they need is the ability for players to choose who to play with

Great video, pleased to see another LoL player out there. I think, for me, it's the point in League history where I quit. I really like the characters, I love my main Aatrox, I like this game. But install rootkit into my PC is not worth it. My machine is my workstation and personal machine at once. And I don't think I can risk my data just like that.
Sad news, but it is what it is. You're not alone in this opinion

This is why I barely run any games on my PCs. For a programmer consoles may become more appealing.

I play valorant and as a maldev student, I decided to ignore the problem

I play lol on Linux and this will be the end of lol in Linux

Great reason to play Dota instead

Nope, not installing that. If it ever gets hacked shit hits the fan with tremendous force.

And from years of playing league, my experience with Riot's coding skills tells me it WILL eventually happen.

The one really frustrating thing I had with Vanguard for Valorant was having to disable any type of virtualization on my computer. It was increasing annoying when I would want to run WSL or anything that required it and I would have to go and turn it on.

I have lost faith in Riot. I used to play League of Legends on Linux, running through WINE. One day they permabaned my account saying that I use cheating scripts. They refused to provide any information about when I was detected and what I was using. I was confused. I play league like once a week, only with friends. Turns out that it was something wrong with WINE, other people reported and was unbanned due to false detection. But much more people are just like me, losing their decade old accounts forever.

I read some comments in this video hoping that an emulation layer can solve this problem. In my opinion, Riot can ban you without any reason if they think you are cheating. I have seen previous example that someone was ban due to using Discord while playing League, he got the formal reply because he paid a lawyer to send a letter to sue Riot. If you don't have to money to spend, Riot will just continue to say their sophisticated anti-cheat system "CONFIRM" you are cheating and refuse to provide any details.

Time to switch to dota

If the only reason why people don't trust Vanguard is because "Tencent China bad" then they're a victim of American / capitalist propaganda

For me, the major issue its not that Riot Games is owned by Tencent Games, or that Tencent is a chinese company, or even that vanguard runs all the time. While I do hate a bit on all the things I just mentioned, the biggest problem for me is: we found dozens of critical security vulnerabilities in, for example, kernels, code that should be 100% failsafe, code that is open and watched by hundreds to thousands of (skillful) developers for YEARS. No one writes perfect code, much less perfectly secure code. What preventions are made so that we are sure that vanguard does not have a backdoor that evaluates whatever comes in? How can we be sure that vanguard wont break our system because some DLL didnt behave exactly as it wants to? WHO is testing this? etc, etc, etc...

A pretty simple fix for this problem would be to make vanguard open source.

Obviously 99.999% of league players won't make heads or tails of the source code but independent, 3rd party security researchers can audit the code to reach a consensus about its validity as a legitimate anticheat. We don't need to trust riot to know that the anticheat is not acting maliciously.

Basically china gets kernel level access to most computers in the world.

I knew vanguard was invasive but i didnt think it was to this extent, mostly because i have only recently started taking back my privacy. I love valorant and play it a lot. I have been considering switching my desktop to linux and only booting to windows to play valorant, and this just sealed the deal. since it wont be a separate computer I'll make sure my linux partition is encrypted.

1.15 no, you are wrong actually. LoL doesn't have a problem with "cheaters" . I play this crap sunce season 2 and right now, i only recall 1 single player that was scripting in a game. LoL isn't CS where you can download some trash wh from every site. LoL doesn't have a cheating problem. I don't mind about vanguard and i think this is the future of gaming but i think league did not need anti cheat

We need some broad action to stop this rootkit forced on us. We need to be visible.

Never good at the game, quit the game 5 years ago, thank god.

You should switch to dota 2 :3c

Rather have malware than lobby revealers, multi-client free dodge , scripters and win trading. Sorry but i already use google, multiple companies have my data, and my (cum)puter has nothing that needs ro be secure. You dont realise the importance for anti-cheat who are using league to make money.

China can have all the data they want but they are not getting Tibet or Kashmir. Signed, an Indian.

Took you 4 minutes and 18 seconds to say "Vanguard = rootkit". Makes sense that this channel is called low level learning.

the safest option for playing leuge is using either a vm and pass of the gpu (to much work) or use a cloud gaming service like geforce now

I wouldn’t consider that straight malware since we don’t know what it’s intent is outside of preventing cheaters.
Sure it’s shady as hell, but jumping the gun now probably isn’t a good idea.

Please stop making the argument riot is a Chinese company, it is so insanely stupid I'm sorry. You are just fueling the fire to fight an invisible monster that doesn't exist. If your argument was just about the root kit itself, then fine. We all had this debate when Valorant came out and everyone pretty much moved on, but the whole "tEnCeNt iS cHiNeSE" is a pathetic argument. Also, idk how much rank you play or what game mode etc, but in high elo there is an insane amount of cheating and botting. I even met one of the lead designers for league of legends scripts (because he actually bought one of my friends accounts. I would never add this guy on my own, the guy is a total freak/incel) and cheats and had a conversation with him. You would be surprised of the numbers he claimed and the amount of money they make from selling these cheats just for league of legends alone. I am tired of having my games ruined in high elo (and sometimes not even being aware. they turn them on and off and sometimes the cheats are very micro you wont even notice them). A lot of other high elo players are tired too. Believe it or not, no one gives a fuck what you specifically are doing on your computer. No one cares. You are not special. And I really wish people would stop pretending google and apple dont have the same access to all your information everyday and every second and we all willingly accept it. We just are tired of cheaters. Move on bro, you're smarter than this. From 1 software eng from another, please move on.

The worse is cheaters will likely still get around it, just like they do in Valo. Clearly cheating is a sign of some other fundamental issue with a game.

They might be slowly tryna build a botnet or something

Can't you play it in a virtualized environment? It's not the same but I guess it can be pretty close if you have good hardware

You silly little gamers should become of more use to the society instead of crying about a videogame

Never trust China that it

donno man they are not installing viruses cuz they want us to play, they cant steal money cuz u can see it and their company falls, so other informations are read by every fkin company everyday, so...

Why not use a VM?

Glad someone brought it up, im literally waiting for this update to come to reality to uninstall.
I mean it's very invasive and closed source, even when having good faith in RIOT Games still some hacker might eventually find a vulnerabilty and we are doomed

Kind of simple: stopped playing Valorant cause Vanguard made a bluescreen at launch on my computer. When i uninstalled it everything was fine once again. 2 friends had the same problems 1 or 2 months ago, Vanguard uninstalled and everything worked perfectly...
My computer is also my working station doing graphism mostly, so my work is more important than playing Valorant or LoL.
Not playing Valorant anymore (even if it was cool) and LoL is still fun but i m maybe playing 10 games a month with friends so it's not worth to have a kernel anticheat 24/7.
8 of 10 friends will uninstall LoL cause of Vanguard and i m pretty sure we aren't the only one to think the same.

I'm just sad that players will probably continue playing, cause if they lose 90% of their player base in less than a week they would take Vanguard away. (NC Soft changed their Throne of Liberty MMO in less than a month when it was supposed to be impossible in a short period like that... cause people destroyed their game on social medias and they lost a lot of money cause of it...)
Here sadly i think players will once again fall for it, which piss me off a bit cause i play LoL even before season 1 and ranked were a thing... Time to move on i guess and probably skip Riot MMO too in the process cause they'll probably use Vanguard for it too.

Where does the collection stop? "Trust me, bro."

League is no longer possible to play in Linux because of that

Thanks for this PSA :)

and need i remind everyone league client and if i remember correctly engine as well is held together with tape bubble and faith
if there gonna breach its gonna because of a weird fucky interaction between the client and vanguard like look the many cheat programs for league that exist already utilize many of the vulnerabilities in the client itself to do shit like dodge matches without a 5 minute wait time to search for a match again or even straight up crashing matches while in champ select
and unless riot wants to completely overhaul leagues back end theres going to be a vulnerability in the anti cheat through league

When tis the day when anti-cheats either don’t need to be installed locally or need privileges to work when tis day comes the world will be saved

Do not use your work Pc to play games

Vanguard owned by Riot owned by Tencent owned by a majority of Chinese Communist Party shares?

Ok but like what can happen if my shit got hacked through vanguard? What would that look like, what info could they get off my pc? I manage have any bank accounts on my pc, its legit just games a school so I don’t really see whats worth worrying about

I would much rather China having my data instead of the CIA, thank you very much

So you want to tell me that it makes it way more risky when either way if someone would want to get root access to your computer they will get it I don't think this makes it less safe/more safe. I just think that either way in this day and age so many programs collect your data I feel like there's no point to be worried about this...

But what if you just play, and then stop the process? It still works somehow? Im not really into ciber security, so that's why Im asking

LINUX:

DISCORD is malware
WINDOWS is malware
LoL is malware.

I guess everything is headed that way... don't get me started on secret AI implemented in every iphone ever...

It seemingly doesn't make sense to talk about security anymore.

You sound paranoid.

oh my god a company did a root kit anticheat for a game and now they want to implement it in another game omg noo the world will end no way they will steal our data and send them to chinese government then china will send nuclear attacks all around the world omg