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.
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?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
very prevalent
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