- Table of Contents
Intro
Patch 14.4 marks the expected launch of Vanguard anti-cheat in League of Legends and while it’s planned for mid-February 2024, it heralds extreme problems a month in advance.
While “extreme” sounds like clickbait lingo, what else would one call the inability to play League of Legends after they sunk a decade or more into it? Similarly, a precious community resource will dry up as a consequence of Vanguard in LoL and those who remain will have to deal with the constant possibility of their PC being at risk thanks to the invasive anti-cheat no one asked for.
Here are the major problems Vanguard will cause and why the community is rightfully pushing back.
TPM 2.0
One of the big selling points for League of Legends is that the game can be played on old systems and run smoothly to provide competitive parity to everyone. With Vanguard’s introduction, many of the players with older hardware will get axed from the pool entirely.
The reason is Trusted Platform Module (TPM 2.0), which is required for rigs running Vanguard. In the simplest of terms, TPM is a safety doohickey in a motherboard that older models don’t have. If your mobo doesn’t have it, you are unable to play Valorant and won’t be able to play League of Legends soon.
It is advised to check which motherboards support TPM 2.0 ahead of time. If yours is not on the list, it is either newer and supports the feature anyway or older and you have to get a new motherboard if you wish to continue playing League.
Skin Spotlights
Riot Games didn’t deem it necessary to provide a decent skin preview for the past 14 years. This drawback of the small indie company was mitigated by the community members who uploaded high quality previews on YouTube and other sites, allowing players to get an informed decision before buying a skin.
Skin Spotlights is the most prominent and longest-running YouTube channel that features the best overviews of upcoming skins by far. Vanguard will make the content creator’s work much harder because the tools used for observing character models from various angles will be recognized as illegal third party software.
Currently, Riot and Skin Spotlights are having some sort of discourse to work around the issue but it appears some members of the company are less-than-friendly with the content creator.
For now, it seems like Skin Spotlights will be able to continue their work in a very limited capacity while some types of content will become impossible to produce.
Trust issues
Gaming community’s discussion of privacy concerns regarding the Kernel (ring 0) access used by Vanguard as soon as you boot up your system have settled down over the years. After all, people got used to the fact that all the social media and video games are now using their data for their own gain.
Leaving your PC exposed is still debatable though.
To date, there is no evidence of incidents where Vanguard’s privileges were used to brick someone’s PC or steal important data. On the other hand, there is a well-documented data breach at Riot Games in 2023 though.
In the FAQ about Vanguard in League of Legends, they stated the security breach is one of the reasons why the anti-cheat is coming to the popular MOBA.
If the irony escaped you thus far, Riot is asking the players to trust them with the security of their computers while highlighting a massive security breach in their own backyard.
Vanguard isn’t needed in League of Legends
League of Legends may be filled to the brim with toxic players but its track record with removing or snubbing cheaters is actually pretty good.
When Valorant was about to be released, people knew a F2P shooter would immediately become a high priority for cheat makers which is why Riot had a lot of support from the community, despite the controversy. People were willing to endure problems caused by Vanguard to avoid playing with a large cheater population. This is just not the case with LoL.
To begin with, League isn’t nearly as attractive as a F2P shooter for cheaters and the reasons for it are explained in the next paragraph. As a consequence, the percentage of cheaters in LoL player base is much smaller than in other free-to-play games which translates to Vanguard not being crucial in the overall picture.
Some scripters still get away with it in higher ranks but even before they get banned, players tend to figure out how to beat the cheaters through using skill shots to force them into unfavorable positions or they pick a champion that features point-and-click mechanics, which renders dodge scripts useless.
League of Legends is simply an ecosystem where cheaters can’t prosper the way the do in other video games. Therefore, bringing in a draconic solution such as Vanguard is an overkill that will scoop up a handful of scripters or bots and inconvenience the vast majority of the community consisting of legitimate players.
Others will be simply left behind because their hardware is too old.
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