Riot Games Now Requires Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Software for League of Legends, Following Valorant's Implementation

Well if you get asked for sudo, then that's a risk.

You can list all the current loaded drivers. You can examine the system event log for service start operations. You can run with a kernel debugger attached and examine any loaded driver. The driver itself is likely correctly signed and will not require additional user acknowledgement beyond what was given when the game was installed.

It would probably show up in Autoruns. Maybe even with a background service in task manager.

While I do agree with you, some cheats manipulate the memory itself so you would need some elevated privilages to dectect them as the cheats themsevles run with these privileges

Can you name one of those games that have no anticheat and also no cheaters?

Colonel*

Edward Snowden showed that the US is spying on their citicens but nobody seems to care. But when China is doing it, everybody seems to lose their mind.

Not to mention MSI releasing a monitor with built-in AI to highlight enemies for you that almost definitely counts as cheating, yet there's nothing they can do except ban the hardware all together.

Riot games official statement was that they were okay with linux players and actively went out of their way to make sure they didn't get banned unjustly. They didn't support linux as a software platform, which is why wine was required, but they did support linux players.

I gave up League years ago when every update the launcher broke, then required some patches done to Wine. I'd known yhe kermel level anticheat would arrive someday but maybe I'm a little surprised it took as long as it did.

Isn't that basically the entire player base anyway?

Good bot, if this is how you earn your keep.

Care to elaborate?

Dota was the OG anyway, LOL coined the term MOBA to shift focus that they stole their gameplay mechanic from one dude, icefrog.

Uhhhh no. Dota is slow and terrible. Not that I think anyone should touch that CCP spyware of a game League.

If we're talking about RTSs as well, there's 0AD, which I tried out briefly during the period between Ensemble Studios being shut down, and the revival of the Age franchise with the HD edition (over a decade ago now, and it looks like 0AD has been under constant development since then).

Security through obscurity clearly isn't working anyway

The creation of cheats would be easier in principle but maybe in knowing than then you wouldn't design a game where you trust the client in the first place. For example; don't tell the client the location of every (unseen/unheard) player on the map in an FPS.

Perhaps there's an alternative to addressing cheating which hasn't been explored. Conventional wisdom was pirates are basically people wanting stuff for free so you should invest in DRM to force them to pay for it - now some treat piracy as a service problem where they instead need to offer a better user experience. I think it's worth investigating if some cheaters would be better satisfied with built-in cheats, and if some non-cheaters would be willing to fight some uneven battles if they knew that's what they were getting into.

By that logic any sever running something open source like Linux would be more vulnerable than say, Windows.

Proving source code would reduce the barrier to entry for creating cheats, but cheats are very prevalent anyway. I do not want to make proprietary games so I have no choice but to find an alternative if I ever choose to make a competitive multiplayer game.

There was a MSI monitor at CES which pops-up a warning when an enemy appears on the mini-map in LoL. Significant cheats may be accessible without going to shading sites (perhaps kernel-level anti-cheat could have some success to figure out what monitor you're using but my understanding is that's easily fooled in software and perhaps undetectable via hardware video splinters). Cheats which do not run on the host machine at all are undetectable by traditional anti-cheats.

I think the end-game of anti-cheat is intolerable. Can one get enough data for machine learning to determining if a player is cheating without a high error rate (banning false positives)? Would players tolerate having cameras recording their inputs like it's a submitted speedrun or an exam during Covid?

osu! is a competitive game that is open source, and its arguably the most popular rhythm game right now and there's not much of a cheating problem.

Chess.

I rest my case.

... No I don't, actually, I have more opinions! Come back!

I feel like being stringently anti-cheat about video games over internet is grasping at wind. Better to be more relaxed, accept that some will cheat and 'earn' themselves a higher elo than they can actually play, and encourage a player base to care about enjoying the game, and to care about winning/enjoying without cheats. If you have to encourage a fanatic player base who would do anything including cheat to get a leg up, maybe you too are forgetting this is only a game.

And for serious competition? Let the tournament organisers provide the hardware on location.

It’s not so much that the source code is available. It’s that there would not be systems in place to ban cheaters, detect them, etc.

It’s open source, why would there be support teams and bans and all that?

tl;dr: Was never toxic or angry, and was consciously trying to not blame others but focus on my performance, but eventually gave up on DOTA, because it's too complex to play seriously and captain a team. Switched to Starcraft2, and realized how mentally taxing and depressing it is when you don't have a team to blame, and that you unconsciously blame teammates because it's a powerful mental defense mechanism. I've never felt worse, stressed and anxious, than after a loosing spree in 1v1 Starcraft.

I've spent hundreds of hours playing DOTA in highschool, and eventually I've reached the conclusion that unless you play with (and ideally are a captain) in a premade team, there's not really a point in playing - you will never get better alone, and you will unconsciously always blame other teammates, making it harder to learn your lessons and improve. (I'm deeply flegmatic and forgiving in regards to others, a archetypal support main, so i never was getting angry or toxic, thankfully. So I was usually more focused on my own performance and didn't care that other fuck up - or so I thought)

I've also quickly realised that the knowledge required to be a captain is something that even after thousands of games, and hours of research, I'll never be able to get. There's so many variables you need to know just to pick a team comp and get through the ban and pick phase, and then you add itemization to the mix, knowing what your team should do based on the current minute, hero picks, and items chosen by your and enemy team.. I really respect any pro player due to that, because its isane how many variables they have to work with.

And so I switched to Overwatch, because there, the meta is a little bit easier to follow and there's not that many variables in play, to be able to lead your team.

I wasn't able to get a stable team willing to take the game seriously, and eventually I've also noticed that I still tend to subconsciously focus on what my team did wrong, instead of my own gameplay.

So, I switched to StarCraft 2. And oh boy, those were the worst few months of my gaming life. The meta was eaiser to grasp, I knew what to do, the issue was building the muscle memory to execute it correctly. But there are plenty of resources, from training maps to The Staircase method, so I was making a pretty good progress.

However, the Ranked. Here, I've realized how much blaming others in team games is a necessary defense mechanism, because in this game, you have only yourself to blame for every loss. Hitting that play button in Ranked was terrifying, I was regularly depressed and felt terrible after every loss. It was so taxing to my mental well-being, because most of the games you play, just end with: "You suck. That was a beginners mistake. You'll never be good at this game, and you have only yourself to blame. Just give up.".

There's no blaming teammates, theres no " I've made a few mistakes, but my team also...", which as it turns out, being able to do that is a tremendous help in regards to your mental health.

I still had fun, it was a great challenge and I enjoyed learning the game and slowly getting better, but the losses, and especially loss streaks, were so stessfull and taxing, to the point where I was literally anxious to the point of almost having panic attacks every time I wanted to hit that fucking Find Ranked Match button.

But the wins, oh boy I've never felt better in my life. But, you know - as an average player playing at your rank, you should hover around 50% win rate. And that's a lot of losses.

I'd recommend this experience to everyone who keeps playing competitive games with random players. It was eye opening in regards to how you handle losses, and a great introspection into how I subconsciously handle losses in team games, even though I never got angry.)

While it wasn't 100% free from hate, Heroes of the Storm had significantly less of it. Similarly, GW2 has a far friendlier community than WoW, because game design does matter.

i mean, that's not Moba specific, Counter Strike, you get 1 griefer and it becomes a slog fest.

it's the people that suck, lots of raging and griefing at the slightest setback by people who have no life.

Quit that shit a long time ago, have not played multiplayer games in years.

MOBA is possible to be good and have come back games but LoL is entenched in shitty game design choices from 15 years ago and largely survives because its free to play and anyone interested in MOBAs has heard of it and played it. I'd argue games like smite or monday night combat do the MOBA genre better and advance from crippling rts controls on an action oriented game, but those never caught on cause the moba crowd hates change and innovation.

You dropped this \

Thanks for the correction, I've removed the section from my comment.

As if I needed another reason not to ever use Windows 11.

In theory yes, in practice, it's a great way to get banned if they want to crack down

It's pretty close right now, especially since steamdeck and proton. Take a look at protonDB, see if there's a critical mass of your main games to try again?

Dual boot would only protect you if have your other side encrypted or are monitoing it to make sure the other partition is never mounted.

What you need to play games like this is a side-piece computer on its own LAN.

China isn’t leftist or communist

Tencent isn’t an American company

2024 still on the red scare, for an american company nonetheless, lmao.

To be fair, there is a small but real chance that we may be going to war with them someday in the future, over Taiwan.

Do you really want an adversary that can disable a large portion of your populations computers in one fell swoop?

Respectfully, I have to correct you. This argument is not correct way to think about privacy.

For Example :- You don't care what I think about you but if I ask where do you live, what is your bank ac, what messages and email you send and to whom, etc. You will not provide me those details even though you don't care what I think about you. Similarly a player might not care what they think about them but the mere collection of user data is bad for the player.

No, they might be ignorant of how bad this is though

It is at a level where you would write to your representatives to ban it. I assume you are ignorant of rootkits since you mentioned “what they think about you“ rather than “owning your pc”

Microsoft literally took government bux to put in NSA backdoors into windows that are still there to this day.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don't, and all that.

For me it's the opposite, they are so far away from me I couldn't care less what Xiaomi does with my info.

The LoL is only for windows installs rn

They did implement this from my knowledge. I think SomeOrdinaryGamers made a video where he showcases hardening a VM to beat the detection.

Mobile is such a bad experience though.

Bringing some data in, riot games itself was reporting that cheating was not that much of a problem really: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-anti-cheat-in-lol-more/

According to the plot we see there, a very very very minor percentage of games was affected by cheaters in 2020, and I honestly doubt the situation has changed. So, until we see new data from riot, I'm calling bullshit on this whole vanguard thing

Auto dodging, perfect skills hots, staying at max range at all times, instant item usages to maximize potential.

Yeah, nothing illegal officer.

I so wish you had a game with enemy Zeri using scripts. You'd change your mind very quickly.

Even if none of those machines matter, a botnet the size of all valorant + LoL players has a lot of ddos potential.

them

Riot? I don’t see a war with Riot being likely.

/picardfacepalm

It doesn't matter. Nothing should ever need to get that deep into your system...ever.

You need human moderators watching all the players to see if anyone's cheating and then you manually ban the cheaters

Isn't the whole point of anti-cheat to survey the computer? If you aren't getting anything new, then why even use a kernel-level anticheat?

Because the one thing they want to find, cheat software, can hide if it's running in kernel mode and the anti cheat isn't.

and what is their endgame? “Developers are releasing cheats that emualate a mouse. Therefore Riot needs to use a camera to record your hand”?

You mean a device that physically operates the mouse? I don't know, I don't work for riot, but this is done in online chess - to participate in some tournaments with money prizes you need 2 webcams.

If everybody is jumping off a roof, so should Riot?

No, the question is if this discussion also cover all other anticheats that use kernel mode, or is here anything that is League-specific?

Isn’t the whole point of anti-cheat to survey the computer? If you aren’t getting anything new, then why even use a kernel-level anticheat?

This is just splitting hairs on semantics, isn't it? From the moment the app is running in user space, it could collect a huge amount of user info, but it can't look for kernel-level cheat software.

Note that I don't play league, I could care less about the game or the developer, I'm just interested in the privacy vs cheating aspect of the conversation.

“Developers are releasing cheats that emualate a mouse. Therefore Riot needs to use a camera to record your hand”?

The most basic form of anticheat already spots this.
You are so far in the past it's clear why you don't understand it.

As someone who has previously argued that user/kernel-level distinction is pretty pointless (along the lines of this XKCD), the multi-user aspect is something I haven't considered before and actually quite important.

You could drop the flamebait, but all good.

Not only kernel mode “anticheat” will allow snooping on the current account, but on others too, that’s the key difference here.

Can't this already be achieved by elevation? Why would a kernel driver be necessary?

I mean I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that they are definitely actively doing this, but more that if they openly admitted that their anti-cheat software has the ability to invisibly monitor everything on your computer from your browser to your password manager, then people would be way less accepting of it just because of the potential risk.

Yup, very true. There's even the possibility of hardware level cheats, just like that new MSI monitor that analyzes the screen with AI. Imagine that but instead it's a KVM switch like device that can "see" everything happening on the screen as well as the keyboard and mouse inputs. You could train it to recognize and track enemies in an FPS then add in some extra inputs to correct the aim every time you fire, or activate abilities in a MOBA automatically in response to enemy actions. I think this is what Gameshark might be trying to do. Short of requiring cryptographically secure input devices, the only way to detect this type of cheating would be behavioural.

I'm hardstuck Iron, so I just get paired with morons and professional inters.

I think on iOS it's technically possible (or at the very least was at one point) but apple would nuke your app from the store if you tried, so I'm doubtful they would try pulling something like this for apple users specifically.

On android barring a Rooting exploit in the OS (which would also get your app nuked) it just isn't possible, and Rooted users don't really need to worry because they should know better than to grant a game Root access if it asks.

Well thats good news as i only really play tft anymore and can do that on my phone then. Will need to confirm this but it makes sense

People who play League are a different breed bro

Vanguard is being bypassed as well, but users have now a compromised system to the lowest level possible.

So that isn't the solution, i would somewhat understand it if no one is able to cheat anymore, but as long as there are hacks available you can give up on kernel level anti-cheat.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/XKE1vbJY2VA?si=0THIBS2vZcWtVYvJ

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I thought server side anti cheat was the most effective. Since it can't be modified by clients and tracks clients for impossible behaviour.

Valve basically does that with their overwatch system.

There's a company that has AI powered anti heat and they claim it is amazing, but also claim very few companies people wanna work with them. A hint that they know their player count would suffer.

I mean I'd believe everything is bypassable, but I also believe that the Kernel Level Anticheat makes it more difficult to bypass, if that makes sense.