Vanguard just went live and LoL players are already claiming it's bricking their PCs

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 204 points –
Vanguard just went live and LoL players are already claiming it's bricking their PCs
dotesports.com
69

Wow, who could have anticipated that kernel-level anti-cheat was a bad idea? It's like people haven't been warning that giving an increasing number of programs that level of access might be a Bad Idea.

Kernel-level anti cheat is spyware, say it with me everybody. Complain on steam about it. Post this nonstop. This standard is NOT OK and needs to change and that's the only way it might.

Why complain on Steam? If I remember correctly, League of Legends is downloaded through its own installer and it's completely separate to Steam

It used to be on Steam

When?

Back when it was worth playing

You could buy the collector’s edition on Steam or in Store

Or download the free version from their website (or any of the competitor websites that they hacked)

Cool, thanks for telling me. I never really got into mobas, even back in the Dota 1 days, so I didn’t start hearing about LoL until it blew up and my friends were trying get me to play.

I would never let some random anticheat code have kernel access. Games are demanding something crazy, and users are stupidly letting them get it.

It's not just silently installed by Steam, or something, they have to explicitly confirm they accept it? I don't play this game, I am curious if players are unaware or actively stupid.

Riot's games can only be played with their own launcher, so no steam. They give a big message about "now installing vanguard, our anticheat," then inform you to reboot to finish the install, since vanguard is the only ring 0 anticheat that puts itself into the kernel start up, always running.

honestly "installing anticheat" doesnt make justice to what it does

Some are unaware, but most are actively stupid. Bring this topic up in any helldiver's thread and you'll get down voted to oblivion.

I I stalled helldiver's and didn't realize I was doing that.

I'm not exactly savvy though.

The first time I installed Vanguard, for the Valorant beta, it decided to disable my mouse and keyboard on each boot.

Well, you can't cheat if you can't do anything

This is why I absolutely refuse to install Valorant (and now LoL) - I could somewhat understand if an anticheat refused to boot up the game in question if something triggered it, but it going massively outside of its scope and wantonly disabling or killing other processes is just nuts to me.

To be fair, if they were typical RBG mouse and keyboard, and you used the brands software to change their settings, it blocked that software. Those programs were absolute dog shit in terms of security. I have no idea if it forced them to make better software, or Riot just started to allow them. Regardless it's all pointless because Vanguard has been defeated. Imagine making ring 0 anticheat that loads on boot, and it still isn't good enough, fucking LoL pun intended.

Both had optional software, and I only used the keyboard. The software didn't have to be running for either to work, it was only to configure it and then it wrote the configuration to onboard memory. It was the generic mouse and keyboard input drivers provided by Windows that was blocked and it affected a pretty significant number of users.

This is either the final nail on the coffin for playing league on linux or it will motivate linux devs to figure out a way around it. I don’t play league but I did enjoy playing TFT with friends always on Linux.

TFT can at least be played via android (or emulator)

Yeah I guess waydroid is probably the way to go for TFT on Linux

I tried. But Google Play store won't install it on my waydroid because the device is not verified and I don't think it is possible. Correct me if I'm wrong! :)

That's the case with a lot of games when trying to use Waydroid.

I doubt there sustainable way around a kernel anticheat, that will not get you banned eventually. People either have to quit or dual boot.

I installed Fortnite to check out the LEGO mode without realizing EAC was a rootkit and the next Windows update bricked my PC.

I've never had any issues with EAC, it's probably one of the least invasive kernel-level anticheats out there (with vanguard being the most invasive)

Have you actually audited its behavior? Both are proprietary and any kernel module is inherently dangerous.

Even ones like easy anticheat have given me problems where if a game didn't exit properly my whole system got bogged down and required a restart.

Others simply dubbed it “malware” and declared they would be quitting League until the program stopped breaking PCs.

Silly that malware is okay once it stops interfering with your day to day

One of my favourite games to have kernel level anticheat is Helldivers 2, and I think it's definitely caused a few issues for me.

Helldivers 2 works on Linux even with the anti cheat unlike Valorant so there must be some differences there.

Riot's Vanguard is the only one that needs to start with boot, and always run in the background. Others can initialize and close when the game is done, IIRC. Which is why they can work with proton/wine.

Vanguard is always running? More reason for me to never go back to League I guess.

DotA is freedom, you can do crazy fun builds

Supposedly it falls back to usermode anticheat on linux. That's what I heard but there wasn't a source, so could be BS.

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It's really sad that they chose to implement it. I would've loved to play Helldivers 2 but I just refuse to allow them that level of access to my device, especially for a game that isn't even competitive.

That's where I'm at with the game.

Like yeah it looks fun, I'm not willingly installing malware. Especially after the apex legends debacle.

Their explanation for it makes sense though. They were running into the problem that a player could cheat and progress their games faster, etc. Since HD2 is essentially a MASSIVE, single DnD campaign that every player is a part of, those cheaters would break the campaign progress and ruin it for every single other player.

They also include shortcuts to install and uninstall only the anticheat. So you can remove it immediately once you finish playing.

That's that I don't get
You can run the uninstaller without admin privileges so why doesn't the game only have nguard running while the game is
Makes no sense to me

Thankfully on linux we have tools to heavily limit it's access such as firejail. It doesn't just get unrestricted root access

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just play other mobas

There’s realistic only DotA and I can understand the reluctance, the two games are massively different, League is much more suited for casual play.

Ahaha no I swear to god Dota 2 is ridiculously fun

In LoL you play the same game over and over again.

Yesterday on dota I planted trees with my friends to hide and wait for people to come to ambush them lol

You can do all sort of funny stuff, TPing people in your base etc… everything is OP so you don’t feel like you have no agency. You feel like it’s just your skills that are lacking!

I mean, ive played some dota in the past, i have about 200h on it, not nearly as much as league tho. But IME, especially for solo, league is just nicer overall. The mechanics for champions seem a lot more polished these days, and it is a lot more action focused, you have to worry about macro much less. The games are also like 50% shorter in league. As a solo player I find league to be a lot more laid back, where I can just play the champ more than play the game, if that makes sense.

To each their own of course, Im not saying one game is better than the other, but it is a hard sell to transition league to dota.

You’re right, DoTa is a lot more chaotic, but there’s a lot of action on the map! Macro play is not necessarily doing nothing in this game and often time fight breakout for runes, etc…

I think it’s about preference rather than reality because we had two completely different experiences so yeah, I love League but I don’t see the point of playing it now!

While I'm League hater, I would love if the Dota meta shifted to shorter games like League has. I really miss the strategic depth of normal/ranked, but realistically if I want to play more than one match per evening, I have to play turbo mode.

Turbo has immortal players in it, I've gotten up to 4 immortal players in one game of my turbo players, average ancient-divine rank games pretty often

I actually play a lot of "Turbo mode" in DotA 2, everything is 2x gold 2x exp. Games end faster! Towers have less armor and less HP. Games end at 12 minutes for stomps and 20ish minutes for even games

Hmm, is there a ranked mode for it?

It has auto hidden rank you can check your average rank of the mmr in the game afterwards with 3rd party websites

In league non-ranked matchmaking is pretty all over the place. It is also supposed to be mmr based. In a single session i can play vs everything from iron to emerald, how is it in dota?

There's hidden mmr so the game calculates your rank based on your impact in the game, it easily detects smurfs as well. So you just play and you'll end up with people similar skilled in Unranked

HOTS is actually in a released state

It’s what the former pros/high elo lol players go to

I had read somewhere about it being in a rough state playerbase-wise, which i guess isnt true, but it is no longer receiving updates, right? Anyway, might check it out.

Bug fixes and balance updates only

Draft is dead

Quickplay, ranked are alive

ARAM is more popular than on LoL

NA/EU the game is alive

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZXA2Q1HT_k&pp=ygUHa2hhbGRvcg%3D%3D

If competitive is your thing

what about making actual authoritative servers?
that would break most cheats except *-bots

also there's usually no need to replicate the entire game state on all clients, some details like movements of players out of view can be omitted (ofc this doesn't apply to lol but whatever)

I've never played it, but aren't League of Legends servers already authoritative? Also, I'm pretty sure it would only deal with certain kinds of cheats. An authoritative server won't be able to prevent a player from using an aimbot, for example, since nothing says that a player isn't allowed to have super accurate aim. The server can't tell if they are cheating or just insanely good. Nevermind I missed your sentence mentioning *-bots.

I wonder whether, even with an omnipotent anticheat software installed, cheating would still be possible by having the router manipulate your packets on the way to the server (ie. having all the *-bot work being done on that device). I imagine TLS could maybe thwart that attempt, since the router can't decrypt the packets, but I don't think it's really a problem since the client could also just provide it with the unencrypted packet and the server's public key, so that the router may fabricate the packets. On the other hand, anticheat software would be aware of that since the client has to send those extra packets, but how could it know that those packets are being sent for nefarious purposes and not just simply some other normal software doing it's thing?

I loved the way CS:GO1 had an anticheat program called Overwatch. If you are experienced enough and a trusted user, you can review games that players have reported and ban the cheaters if you deem them cheating. I don't know if csgo2 has this but I haven't seen it so far.