Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.
Summary:
The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.
The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.
Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.
Is this the death of LoL on Linux, then? It was possible to get it working pretty well a few days after every patch, but this will change all that.
Yes, if Valorant hasn’t been playable on Linux due to Vanguard then so will LoL.
It’s the death of LoL anywhere. Only suckers will play it.
Isn’t that basically the entire player base anyway?
Yes unfortunately. Just gotta hope that none of those suckers can be exploited for military advantage. Probably not.
Different software purposes and all, but it vaguely puts me in the mind of the Sony compact disc DRM scandal.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal concerns the copy protection measures included by Sony BMG on compact discs in 2005. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and “phone home” with reports on the user’s private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software’s existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.
Good bot, if this is how you earn your keep.
I was gonna care until I read league of legends. Clearly people already hate themselves and despise sensible choices and alternatives. Otherwise they wouldn’t play lol.
Everything bad about LoL is it being a MOBA. I think you can’t prevent toxicity in a MOBA.
In a team with randoms, if you start losing you’re stuck in an unfun game where you get crushed by the ennemi for half an hour.
What’s not to love?
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 must not have paid attention to the smite “pro” scene if you believe that game is in a good spot.
Another reason not to play LoL.
Another game I’ll never play 👍🏻
Eh, probably for the best, everything I’ve heard about LoL is that it turns you into a toxic hateful shell of a human.
This won’t change much for me considering i already have a dozen reasons not to play this shit ass game
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Sell sell sell!!!
Is there an open source MOBA? Players need an alternative, even if it’s not as good to begin with.
Dota has always been a drastically better game, I see this as an absolute win for Linux. League is cancer.
Uhhhh no. Dota is slow and terrible. Not that I think anyone should touch that CCP spyware of a game League.
I would argue that the pacing of a Dota match is one of the many things that makes it better than League.
I find league is insanely repetitive and has very little room for player creativity or expression beyond “I can hit my skill shots”. It’s just rote exercise that you can map out to the minute. Dota gives heroes and players space to breathe and flexibility to play in multiple ways, not to mention having a balance team that actually wants to balance the game, not just sell the latest champions.
Whew, I can tell you never got particularly good at league. You’re probably right about macro decisions and definitely right about new champions being OP on release, but matchups and micro interactions are where it’s at!
That said, I’ll never play again.
Nope, I just realize how much better it can be when the dev team has creativity and respect for players.
Not that I know of, the most popular open source games I have heard of are Space Station 13 (and its newer release Space Station 14 on steam), and Beyond All Reason which is an RTS.
An open source and popular MOBA would have an even larger problem with cheating and bad actors.
Edit: people are missing the point, and I didn’t state it fully.
What open source games have moderation teams and support teams? What open source games want to deal with ban evasion? What open source games want to deal with the notoriously toxic MOBA communities?
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.
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.
If the group doing the spying is ideologically in the same “tribe”, people don’t seem concerned. It’s both a survival mechanism and our Achilles heel.
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.
Agreed. China isn’t going to put together a bogus profile based on poorly researched correlations and throw me on a list with no ability to defend or appeal the decision. And if they do–who cares? I’m never going to China.
This makes more logical sense however most people see foreign as worse than local but controlling.
They can fuck all the way off.
After studying operative systems this semester, it’s crazy that developers are really out there giving level 0 privileges to an application program.
Get that shit far, far away from my machines
I assume that anyone that actually cares probably doesn’t play LoL to begin with.
As a geopolitical side note to all this, there is a small but real chance that we may be going to war with (Edit: China) someday in the future, over Taiwan.
Do you really want an adversary that can potentionally disable a large portion of your populations computers in one fell swoop?
Edit: Because of Tencent’s ownership of Riot, which is a Chinese company.
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keep in mind Riot is an american company owned by a chinese one so idk if they would actually side with china
One can only hope. Back doors do exist, and seeing how parts of American politics these days seems to favor certain foreign countries, I’m not so sure. Greed seems to override oaths.
them
Riot? I don’t see a war with Riot being likely.
them
Riot? I don’t see a war with Riot being likely.
/picardfacepalm
Windows: $ insmod < “http://shady-ring0-blob-from-internet.sys.cn” What could possibly go wrong?
No thanks, I’ll stick to dota 2 and cs2. Everyone else should do the same, this kernel level anti cheat doesn’t even work. Well, no anti cheat is perfect, but vanguard isn’t any better than any other anti cheat. All it’s doing is collecting data about your computer and running at an insanely invasive level.
What about dead by daylight’s easy anti cheat?
Data collection is the least of your concern with a kernel level anti cheat
Oh, so the company which changed groovy Zilean into a cranked out meth head to please the CCP, because they’re legally obligated to serve them, now wants kernel level access to every computer playing the most popular PVP game?
Fuck everything about that. China’s openly stated goal is world domination and they control every facet of their citizen’s lives, AND STILL HAVE MORE VIDEOGAME CHEATERS THAN ANYWHERE ELSE!
This has nothing to do with anticheat.
