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 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.