Regarding Vanguard in League of Legends

[tiny hill]

Post got removed. Edit this post with the contents of the original please.

[crystal dome]

Post is deleted

But comments are talking about data privacy. As I've always said, data privacy isn't what you should be worried about, since Vanguard doesn't have access to your data in any way that League of Legends doesn't already

[tiny hill]

I think the real issue is vanguard has kernel access while running in the background 24/7.

[crystal dome]

That's what the program does yes but I find a lot of people seem to think that's scary without analyzing the risks properly

Because again I keep seeing people talk about "spyware" and "data privacy" and similar things that simply aren't relevant.

[faint gate]

Honestly what browser or program nowadays that don’t have your data

At least one thing on your pc or phone has your personal data

[zenith frost]

so do most anti cheats, they just dont tell you theyre doing it

non kernel level anticheats are basically useless

[long latch]

"cough" vac

[zenith frost]

vac, vanguard, kamu, denuvo are all examples of it

people only crying about vanguard because riot are open about it and they want something to complain about

[faint gate]

Again, what device or program isn’t tracking your data right now?

[zenith frost]

Mmm, I think people have the right to know what is running in your background regardless of its intended purpose. To me Vanguard simply feels so sketchy

Like if this is only an Anti-cheat software then why does it need to be On even when I'm not playing the game?

[meager aspen]

Lul I think people don’t know what spyware and data privacy

Are

[azure mist]

I dont get this whole issue for 2 reasons:

1. What the heck can Riot do even if they have everyone's data? There are millions of people that downloaded Vanguard anyways.

2. People acting like their data is no longer private but youre on the internet. Your data is already leaked by existing in the internet by your service provider. Not to mention, there are most likely sites that you visited or maybe even apps like Steam that have your data. I mean you literally have the option to save your payment in their system if you want.

[woeful quail]

Vanguard has much more access to your data than the league client does.

There just isn't a reason for riot to do anything bad with it because they will lose out on so much revenue if they ever get any bad publicity.

[crystal dome]

Because that way it can prevent you from loading a cheat software when the game isn't loaded

You also don't have to leave it running 247, provided you dont mind rebooting PC when you want to start playing the game

[zenith frost]

That's extremely intrusive. Why does an anti-cheat software need to be constantly scanning my PC while the game isn't even running

[crystal dome]

I just explained why

[zenith frost]

Yea, but think about what you're saying here?

It's purpose should be to only detect cheating. Yet even when I'm not playing it's constantly looking through my hardware?

[crystal dome]

Yeah

[zenith frost]

That's not only sketchy but also intrusive

[crystal dome]

Because otherwise you just load a cheat software before starting the game and your anticheat can never find it

I understand you may think that's more intrusive than is worth it, but it's that way for a specific reason

[zenith frost]

As a consumer I'm baffled but I can understand from the engineer's perspective why it has to be like that

[crystal dome]

And again, you don't actually need it to be running when you aren't gaming, although if you think needing to restart pc every time you want to open league is too much then that's completely reasonable and you can ignore that justification

[meager aspen]

Vanguard only active if play one of those game

[woeful quail]

Other anticheats are as good without needing to always be running.

[crystal dome]

I see players in other games complain about anticheat being useless much more than valorant players. I know that's unscientific though.

[woeful quail]

because kernel anticheats are very good at what they do

[crystal dome]

I've also seen other people say that various other anticheats also run at boot but I don't know if that's actually true

[woeful quail]

Some do. The biggest one I know of that isn't Vanguard is Faceit's anticheat

The other ones like eac and be are both drivers that launch when the game is launched, not always running like faceit and vanguard

[crystal dome]

eac is famously not very good isnt it

[woeful quail]

depends the game. Eac and Be are more known as anticheats that are for people who don't have the budget to develop their own ac andor are smaller game companies with no reason to create an ac on release of their game

[crystal dome]

hence "easy"

[woeful quail]

Fortnite uses both and it's extremely good at catching cheaters in tournaments, not so much normal games, as you need to be manually reviewed and banned by a dev if you have a good cheat.

[crystal dome]

tournament play you get physical access to the player machines dont you

[woeful quail]

Reading into it though you'll find Vanguard and Riot themselves have a pretty good track record for being very hard to crack into

[crystal dome]

if they arent specifically maintained by the TO

[woeful quail]

Touranment play as in things like cash cups. If you're cheating you'll get banned much quicker as there is more devs watching and I believe BattlEye actually launches on that mode and EAC is for the game always.

[crystal dome]

oh got it

[woeful quail]

I'm not 100% sure if thats how the ac's work on fortnite but it would make sense. It's much more difficult to develop a cheat to pass an anticheat that is only active during tournament play and those are much less common = less time to work on bypasses.

Lots of mixed opinions coming out though. Some people say you shouldn't really be too spooked with Vanguard since many other processes are easier and just as powerful like steam or nvidia while other people like LowLevelLearning is quitting league over this and is a cybersec expert. Meanwhile a lot of the scary things from this can happen in less privileged rings

[zenith frost]

most games use kernel level anticheat though
r6, ow, cs, dota, fortnite, cod
even steamworks is a kernel level anticheat

[tiny hill]

The complaints really center around it constantly running more than anything.

[zenith frost]

you can just disable it yourself though when you're not on the game, if that's really an issue

[tiny hill]

To be honest, this thing makes me feel uneasy. I really hope they kill botted accounts and scripters after this goes through.

Botted accounts have effectively destroyed rank integrity in plat and emerald elo.

[zenith frost]

vanguard is really effective in val so it likely will, obviously yeah there's still some cheaters but it's at a far lower amount than any other major competitive game, especially right now imo

val also recently did a huge ban wave of botted accounts via vanguard so the chances thatll happen in league too is high

[tiny hill]

Another concern I have is the impact this will have on custom skins, maps, and announcer packs.

[zenith frost]

that concern I'd understand tbf, as custom skins will definitely be affected, but I'm sure there will be some work around to it

[woeful quail]

Vanguard isn't needed to be able to spot botted accounts. They are so easy to spot, scripters are the only thing Vanguard is going after and it's because high elo has so many scripters who aren't getting banned but blatant.

[faint gate]

And reporting hasn)t worked has it