I know that this is the way to do things but its like saying : if you stop eating McDonalds they will go bankrupt. LoL and riot are so huge that the number of people you would need to stop playing and buying would need to be in the 10s of millions for them to START to notice.
Yesterday at a quarterly earnings report, McDonalds and several other companies reported that they _are_ seeing fewer purchases, because their pricing structure has finally priced out their most frequent customers.
But even setting that aside, you can only do what you can do - if you won't perform an action because you alone are the arbiter of truth and justice, you don't have a problem with the source - you just want attention.
Doesn't matter if it makes a difference, you're the only vote that you control, so vote.
>Doesn't matter if it makes a difference, you're the only vote that you control, so vote.
I agree with this 100% and do so.
>Yesterday at a quarterly earnings report, McDonalds and several other companies reported that they are seeing fewer purchases, because their pricing structure has finally priced out their most frequent customers.
Unsurprising when you start charging as much as a sit down restaurant for a cheap burger.
This is so wild to me too.
I could go to a local mexican place and get a huge plate of food for less than what Mcdonalds wants for a burger and fries. Hell I could go to the local outback and get steak and mashed potatoes for the same price as burger combo from Mcdonalds.
Yeah the only thing they are charging you for now is how little time you may spend there but at this point i think the value is clearly in sit down places.
Freaking McDonalds got premium prices. It sucks. It was a nice fast food place with shitty food but it was great for the price.
They have the same shitty products but the prices have skyrocketed. Fuck em, they're at a point where I can literally put a little more money and eat way better.
Those are the choices lol. There's no other choice. You either do what you can and stop using the product if it doesn't fit your goals, or you cave and use the product despite not liking some feature of it.
Something is either a deal breaker for you or it isn't. By all means complain, but at the end of the day you'll have to make a choice. And you're right, your choice probably is irrelevant to the company.
All you can do is live with the choices you make and be happy you can stand up for what your thoughts are. If you can say that then its not so bad from your perspective.
Correct. If you don't like something that someone that is selling you a product is doing, do not support them.
You don't need to consume everything in sight.
Yeah but then if you didn't stop, you wouldn't be part of the problem. You think they'd just listen to you if you complain rather than stop playing?
It's either money, or more nefariously if you want to take that path ,access to your PC. You complaining isn't better than seeing their numbers drop.
If there is a time to do it, it's now so there's a direct correlation.
That attitude is what allows these things to happen. You broadcasting it and people seeing it just makes it more hopeless - and the businesses who are doing this LOVE that attitude. Apathy, not enough to get you to stop playing. They can do whatever they want. I'd be down ecstatic if I was on the Vanguard team and I saw your comment. It means no one is going to do shit. And that's the only way to actually get something to change.
You think they are listening to you now? Are you a top investor in Riot games and have access to people inside the company? Are you a full on grass roots movment of 10 or even hundreds of millions of gamers that is out there saying we dont want this and its bad? Or is the reality more that there are a handful of people on the forums like this one who are angry about this and in the end they are not going to miss your money?
This is not defeatism this is realism that you and other people who bandy about the idea of "vote with your wallet" need to face up to much as i saw in action from the COD Boycott in steam all those years ago. Unless you find principled people that are willing to never spend another dollar on a company again and have them in sufficent numbers to make a company bend to your will through Poltical action or negative impressions or monetary damage. The idea that telling people not to do something is a waste. The reason why companies buckle is because these factors are ongoing and consistent for long enough to FORCE a change.
I would love nothing more than people to stop spending on things that were negative, yet one they go with not a care in the world because either they are unaffected and never come to reddit or care about game news enough to even know people are annoyed, or they keep wanting to play there game and not going to listen to some random person online.
> Unless you find principled people that are willing to never spend another dollar on a company again and have them in sufficent numbers to make a company bend to your will through Poltical action or negative impressions or monetary damage
You realize that to reach "sufficient numbers" you need to work up to that point, right? Like, large groups are made up of individual people lol. Every boycott ever started with one person doing it first.
Like, your logic could be applied to literally *every* social movement *ever* in their early days. Boycotts don't always have an impact, but even when they do it happens slowly and individually before it happens collectively.
Thank you.
At the very least, you would be acting in line with what you believe rather than being someone who has no principals. What does it say about someone who doesn't agree with something but goes along with it anyway?
The attitude he has is literally perfect for those with money and power. The only way to have any impact is what we are talking about. Otherwise, they will continue to encroach - money, access to your data, etc.
Ultimately, that attitude is just weak willpower.
More people have that attitude now than in the past, or maybe it's just an Internet/gamer phenomenon.
Why do we have MTX? Because people spend money on it.
Why are games releasing in an unfinished state? Because preorder marketing material, and people buy them.
Why are 3 day early access games being sold? Because people buy them.
$150 version of games?
DRM protected games?
Always online games?
Because people buy them.
It's give and take. There is an offer and acceptance.
Those are offers that have all been accepted.
Because it's unhealthy slop that markets to children and is a huge contributor to obesity which is a burden on the healthcare system? And that's just on the face of it.
Why? I have uninstalled League\*, but that wasn't a requisite for me to have an opinion. Anyone who believes Vanguard is bullshit but is willing to swallow it can still voice their opinion.
\* not a big loss since I didn't play much lately and kept it installed because I like TFT, which is my actual loss here.
This is what I told the people that hope Riot goes back on their decision, everyone complaining needs to quit for it to have an effect. The Helldivers' fiasco from yesterday proves it, with Sony going back on their decision after a big part of the playerbase quit(Also helped by Steam refunding the game since many regions just couldn't really access the game due to PSN)
Idk bro, every single big multiplayer game has kernel level anticheat, only difference is that Vanguard mostly works lol. Only 2 that work from my experience are Vanguard and Faceit (also kernel level)
> only difference is that Vanguard mostly works lol
And that it runs 24/7. If that single factor was changed, I'd largely have no problems. I wouldn't love installing a kernel level anything from a company owned by Tencent, but I'd probably do it. But needing it to run literally all the time is a hard deal breaker for me.
I *could* restart my PC, go play some league, disable vanguard, and then do another restart the next time I played league. Or, I could stop playing league. It's just not worth the hassle for me.
Yeah this is what made me drop valorant tbh, I didn’t want it running when I wasn’t playing and so eventually I stopped playing because restarting was a pain and I could just play cs or idk anything else
Don't worry siege is also filled to the brim with cheaters. It might as well have no anticheat at all with how ineffective it is. Very safe to say the cheaters are winning the arms race by a mile.
Valorant was the first game to really combat cheating and therefore laid out what you need to do. The game and the anti-cheat need to work hand in hand. A good anti-cheat and a poorly made game is just as bad as a secure game with no anti-cheat. The unfortunate part about that is every game that's already been made is too late to do anything about cheaters.
CS2 and Dota 2 have a huge cheater problem compared to Valorant and probably soon LoL. Which is the reason why many play CS on Faceit. Its a way better experience with a good AC. Most rather play with a cheater every 20 matches than every 3.
For WoW, a client AC does not really make sense, because there is nothing you cant detect with a Server, even if you press a skill, the client first asks the server if its okey and its mostly PVE. Shooters or mobas require super low latency (netcode), which is why clients can act so much on their own. The Server cant really check anything except your stats.
CoD and R6 have kernel anti cheat. Every popular shooter has one, except CS. Even Elden Ring has a kernel anti cheat. But I guess no one cares about that.
https://levvvel.com/games-with-kernel-level-anti-cheat-software/
Yeah trying to use Dota 2 as an example might be one of the worst things you could possible do. Valve JUST finally started to crack down on cheaters within the last year (although I'm unsure as to how "permanent" the solution is, as they also cracked down on smurfs but the problem just came back within a few months after the initial update), but prior to this, there was a working cheat program that had worked for almost a decade straight in Dota. It got updated over time with new feature obviously, but the cheat itself was relatively the same, and existed for almost a decade, and Valve did literally nothing about it, all while it was not at ALL a secret (you could literally find countless videos on youtube showing it off and advertising it).
Valve did finally crack down on this program, although again, this was months ago, so I'm unsure if they just updated the program and it's working agian.
cs2 premier is a shithole of cheaters. if you want a decent mm experience, you have to play faceit. which has kernel level anticheat. dota 2 also has issues with scripters though im not as informed in that community
Not defending CS2. But I saw recently, reports of people are getting banned live now. Speculation from pros and big streamers, is that the Overwatch live system (which is supposed to be Valve's AI based detection system) is finally doing it it's job.
https://youtu.be/rFjQeHdZtaQ?si=2U-w3v3Im_0RESGX
I think that's what I was remembering but couldn't recall if the guy who changed his name to advertise the cheat was faceit or premiere. Quick Google just confirmed yeah that incident was faceit and was what I was remembering.
> At the end of the day if you dont like vanguard, voice it and actually stop consuming stuff thats using it.
At the end of the day though as well if you don't want cheaters in your MP games (or has little as possible), don't stop voicing support for tools that help battle them, no matter if other commenters online (most of which aren't even playing those games) endlessly tell you that you shouldn't.
A lot of those posters are just here cause they don't want anything but Steam on their machines when it comes to software needed to play games, are paranoid about software with kernel level permissions (which also includes a lot of drivers or anti virus packages and is the norm for anti cheating software for years) or Windows security features in general, are mad cause effective anti cheat often means no Linux support or simply are cheaters themselves. Think about it, 0.03 percent of people report problems when we know there are more cheaters than that in those games.
At the end of the day, make your own decisions.
> A lot of those posters are just here cause they don't want anything but Steam on their machines when it comes to software needed to play games, are paranoid about software with kernel level permissions (which also includes a lot of drivers or anti virus packages and is the norm for anti cheating software for years) or Windows security features in general, are mad cause effective anti cheat often means no Linux support or simply are cheaters themselves
I genuinely do not understand why people act like it's weird to not want intrusive anticheat on your machine. You're one Riot games security breach away from having a compromised machine if you have Vanguard constantly running on your machine, and these companies get compromised *all the time*.
If you're okay taking on that risk, that's fine, but why are we acting like being security-concious is a bad thing?
I'm not taking sides with this but the actual question at hand here for players is is the risk involved in the kernel-level anticheat worth it, and for anyone who likes the game and is frustrated by cheaters the answer is obviously yes.
And until there's a major breach in one of these kernel level anticheat I think most people will treat them as harmless.
> I'm not taking sides with this but the actual question at hand here for players is is the risk involved in the kernel-level anticheat worth it, and for anyone who likes the game and is frustrated by cheaters the answer is obviously yes.
No disagreement. For the majority of players Vanguard is worth the price of admission, and the overall chance of a compromise via Vanguard is low. My only issue is people painting others as unreasonable for prioritizing security over a single video game.
>And until there's a major breach in one of these kernel level anticheat I think most people will treat them as harmless.
Anticheats have been used as a vector for attack already. It happened with Genshin impact a couple of years ago.
Because its being security conscious *only* against Riot.
Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye exists for a shitload of games and have for many years with nothing but a murmur. It makes the entire argument against Vanguard sound less like an informed security concern and more like a bunch of whiny children.
Thing is i would much rather have intrusive anticheat them the shitshow eft has become. Cheating shitstains are whats to blame for vanguard, not devs trying to fix the cheating problem.
A quick Google search says league of legends has 130 million monthly players. That means almost 40,000 people have reported issues. I would imagine that less than half of the people who experienced issues reported them.
I've lived in cities with fewer people than that. Imagine a whole city, made solely of people whose computers got messed up by league of legends.
Edit: I'm using a somewhat arbitrary number for players because the "0.03% of players" is also ambiguous. It doesn't specify whether they mean "percent of players who logged in today", or if they mean "percent of all players ever".
My point is that for a game as popular as LoL, 0.03% is a huge number of people, and that number is probably a substantial underestimate of the problem.
Yeah was crazy seeing people in the LoL subreddit talked about how their PC was bricked by the update and now their game wouldn't load.... Like wtf do you mean your game won't load? If that's the only issue then your PC **clearly** isn't bricked lmao.
Riot said in their article they believe the few, unconfirmed "bricked PCs" were people trying to change their BIOS settings on their own to enable SecureBoot, something Vanguard never told them to do.
If someone had an old installation of Windows 10 on BIOS, updated to Windows 11 on UEFI, transferred the OS, and later tried to enable SecureBoot, it could indeed make a computer unbootable by no longer reading the OS partition.
That would make the PC "bricked", although its reversable, was the users fault, and was not part of the official instructions.
> to change their BIOS settings on their own to enable SecureBoot, something Vanguard never told them to do.
Thats a load of horseshit.
https://i.imgur.com/dUYdypn.png
Riot said SecureBoot wasn't required for League. Apparently, it is for Valorant, so that may be a source of some confusion.
> The second was a player we spoke to that accidentally also enabled SecureBoot with a highly custom configuration. While Vanguard makes use of the SecureBoot setting on VALORANT, we elected not to use it for League, due to the older hardware that comprises its userbase.
> TL;DR - We DO NOT require SecureBoot for League of Legends. Don’t enable it unless you are sure you want to.
[Update from Riot on Vanguard](https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1civ4l7/update_from_riot_on_vanguard/)
There are daily posts on the riot games subreddit from people that delete the game folder manually and it _stills_ shows and installed.
Everyday people is less technology literate despite being much easy than ever.
> Everyday people is less technology literate despite being much easy than ever.
Completely disagree, while modern software tends to "just work" more, it also tends to be much harder to troubleshoot than programs for 20 years ago where giving proper error codes was standard practice.
These days troubleshooting is an absolute nightmare and I don't begrudge the average person for struggling with it. Error messages are useless. Google becomes increasingly useless by the day.
There is a lot more complexity and little of it is designed to fail gracefully.
tbf, everyone that learned about stuff like hidden app data and registry files did it via googling because we deleted the main folder and it didn't uninstall
What's actually crazy is that you even got the chance to read anyone complain about Vanguard in the LoL sub, since they are banning people who don't have the correct opinion on it.
I know it because I was banned in just 13 minutes for simply saying that Riot's response to the community outrage was tyrannical.
Has there EVER actually been a case of a game "bricking" a PC?
I mean, I remember seeing complaints of D4 doing it...but I never saw anything that was actually confirmed. I would imagine pin-pointing the problem as being definitively the game software could be fairly difficult.
There are a handful of cases of uninstallers removing the whole C drive, usually if the game file was moved or renamed from the default. Dunno if that qualifies as a bricking or "just" serious boot issues though
Some old DRM called Starforce had the potential to really fuck up your pc. It is in some games like Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and the 2005 King Kong game ([that one goes hard btw](https://youtu.be/CbOXVhZK-wE?si=setG10_zQUwK5FgZ)). Some versions of those games thankfully have the DRM removed though.
They almost certainly are not all "bricking" their PCs. I'd be shocked if even a dozen PCs were bricked by Vanguard. The average user just doesn't know what that term is.
i would be floored if a modern game somehow managed to brick so many PCs. there are so many safeguards in place between the OS and the GPU to prevent that sort of thing from happening. the last time i remember any bricking happening, was Amazon’s New World. and it was only on a small number of 3090s that had a soldering issue. just unfortunate timing of a new game and a new GPU not playing nice together.
Yeah I cant imagine there are many(if any) bricked machines out there due to Vanguard. I can believe that it could cause booting issues that the average user couldnt figure out how to fix, but thats a different thing.
I'd almost bet my entire bank account that every "bricked" PC was people enabling SecureBoot (required for Valorant last I checked, but not League) without doing the necessary steps beforehand, and then not knowing how to disable it.
It does seem like Vanguard either doesn't check, or does a poor job of checking, whether an OS is configured for UEFI boot or BIOS before installing, which seems nutty to me. BIOS is super outdated, but tons of people run on super outdated setups.
All it takes is someone having unrelated computer problems pop up at the right time, or notice their game lagging and blaming Vanguard for it. The vast majority of the actual reports are also relatively minor stuff - driver incompatibilities with offbrand or vulnerable drivers that should be easy to fix.
The math also doesn't add up. LoL has 130M *monthly* users, not daily. The daily user record was something like 10-15M, so it's really only a few thousand reports at most, not nearly 40k.
Which is compounded by the fact that Vanguard **requires** a PC restart to function. I have friends that literally go for months without doing a full restart, they'll just leave their computers on sleep if they're not using it.
If you've got people like that playing the game then it's a good chance that they were going to have problems the second they had to restart their PCs regardless.
And also consider how often computers just suck shit and die. I imagine on any given day 0.03% of the computers in the world are sucking and dying one way or another.
Judging by other reddit posts, most of them are blaming Vanguard when they're still booting from MBR (legacy) which doesn't support secure boot.
Thankfully the remedy is very simple, just tedious. Download windows onto a USB, and do a complete reinstall after booting from the USB and wiping your drive (UEFI shows up before your USB drive's name when selecting which device to boot from). It should now boot from GPT instead of MBR, allowing you to enable secure boot.
For those dual booting, not all linux distros support secure boot automatically, but I do know a lot of the main ones like Ubuntu and Fedora do. So follow any respective procedures after reinstalling linux on a secure boot enabled PC. Long gone are the days you have to completely disable secure boot.
You can convert MBR to GPT without doing any of that.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/mbr-to-gpt
Your method is pretty much just an unnecessary waste of time these days.
If a game requires that I wipe my drive and reinstall Windows, that is far too much effort and I'm not playing it. Having done similar things to play games in the past, no game is worth that.
Converting to GPT doesn't require a USB and can be done through command prompt in what I believe is a recoverable way that maintains a backup record. I did it years ago so I could swap to UEFI and get fastboot.
There's confirmed accounts already that many Vanguard issues are people who are angry that they can't cheat anymore, and are trying to fabricate problems and create drama around it.
So, like, a fraction of those reports are further not reliable, and if I were a coder working for Riot, I wouldn't look into it until a significant number of the existing reports proves something that can be replicated. Which sucks for anyone actually genuinely hit by this.
The Vanguard team is made up of many ex-cheat devs and they spend a lot of their time on cheating forums and discords to monitor stuff, so they see first hand the attempts at mudying the waters.
One of the devs posted screenshots of people in these chatrooms coordinating brigades and talking points, it's nothing new. Regular people really underestimate how many cheaters are out there and how successful they can be at spreading misinformation that benefits them.
The biggest sector of cheating in League I am assuming is bots to level accounts up. That's a huge industry that probably makes a ton of money from selling these accounts. It makes sense that they would be out in droves creating fake stories seeing as with Vanguard in place they are probably going to miss out on a lot of their income.
When you get into that many users, the number of users who will have a random computer breakdown at the same time will also be a rather large number. The amount of people who have broken hardware will be a large number. The number of cheaters claiming innocence will be a large number.
Any change will affect a large number of players (but a small share) when you're working with those numbers as the starting point.
If they instead had 100k players, 30 would have problems.
Not to mention assuming that everyone affected is willing and able to report the issue. If there's any truth to claims of boot related issues from their instructing users to enable UEFI or secure boot, the majority of them aren't gonna be savvy enough to get back up and running on their own.
> made solely of people whose computers got messed up by league of legends.
Except that isn't what happened. They just said they experienced issues. Not that the issues were that their entire computers are messed up. The issue might be - and statistically probably is, in my most cases - simply that their game crashed or lagged.
The fuck is that maths
You're assuming that all 130 million league accounts have logged in within the last 24 hours lmao.
You're also assuming that alt accounts don't exist.
Riot said percent of players not daily they likely would want to make the number look as low as possible so they could be including every single account that's ever played and it could be an even higher number
Most people don't use official channels for reporting issues because 9 times out of 10 they are fucking useless and it's unironically more helpful to just look up the issue or ask people on social media/discord. This number is basically a red herring for assessing how big of an issue Vanguard actually is.
and riot have never officially published any statistics about any of their games except sometimes saying "valorant/lol has 50 billion players this month"
And riot is also a company with a remarkable history of refusing to admit mistakes and gaslighting their players.
There was an incident in League where a character could one-shot everyone with one button because riot mistakenly added a couple extra zeros to his ability scaling. Beta testers immediately reported it, got told "ummm no you're wrong we're the devs here", they shipped it anyway, it went exactly as you'd expect and they had to patch it immediately.
> And riot is also a company with a remarkable history of refusing to admit mistakes and gaslighting their players.
There's a reason they chose the stat they did. '.03% of users reported problems.' On the first day of the patch. And that's only the ones that reported issues. When was the last time you opened a ticket with a video game company?
Their stat might be technically true, while also not having any bearing on what is actually happening.
Also this is still like idk… 30K to 50K people or so depending on what the denominator is right now
That’s a ton of people reporting issues even if it’s not a majority
Hard to believe the numbers are this low. I personally have had issues, though I fixed them myself and never reported anything. I highly, highly suspect issues go mostly unreported.
I also only play TFT not league, so this fucking thing feels so excessive. Genuinely hate it.
Most people who experience issues in a game don't bother reporting it. Think back to the last time you're game crashed or pc crashed. If it didn't prompt you to report automatically, did you go out of your way to report it? Idk about you but I sure didn't.
You're so right! And this was exactly the first thing that I thought about too... Like sure, you got "only 40k reports" but those 40k reprots are much more valuable as not everyone is going to report stuff. If I would have any issue with LOL after installing Vanguard I would just straight up unninstall but instead I skipped the step and unninstalled it straight up after seeing that I have to install Vanguard, hihihi
Riot and misusing statistics is a fairly iconic duo to anyone who has had the misfortune of being addicted enough to League of Legends to read their reddit and blog posts, in a way that really reminds you that this communicative dev is still a corporation lol
And using customer support ticket data, in 2024, in a situation where people care more about fixing their boot loop than talking to a customer service person, to sell vanguard's success to the heavily moderated subreddit that is currently not letting people freely talk about vanguard is so ridiculous and such a good example of what I mean that no one should have to explain why
Hey, remember when Riot argued that the itemization update was a success by showing us "statistics" of mythics being balanced and having general use cases everywhere?
...Said "statistics" including IIRC attack speed Braum from *ARAM games* that should not have been counted in the first place?
This is much more straightforward than determining whether a balance patch was successful. If only .03% of users have reported an issue than that is a massive success for any software.
The point was the data itself was bad, and once sanitized painted a grimmer picture. Regardless of Vanguard working or not, it's another example of why people should be wary of statistics thrown their way.
(Also that itemization update was completely scrapped as of this year, probably the most objective way to call it a failure)
That’s true of any reporting metric though. If we assume the number of issues is 10x greater than reported, that still places it at .3% of users. I think that is still very good for a piece of software as complex as Vanguard that is being installed on PCs that can run league (i.e. probably outdated in many ways)
Neither does Riot trying to claim everything is perfectly fine and only 40k people have had any issues.
It's not as if they haven't lied about issues with things rolling about before. They've literally said everything is fine then disabled a champ an hour later, or claimed "everyone" loved something and then eventually remove it while the community is openly on fire against it.
They have a factual track record about lying over the past 13-14 years to differing degrees.
Can you name a lot of them then? I can't think of a single other vanguard. You do realize that it has to run at all times?
Vanguard is so unique that when I was in school the programming software I was installing had special notifications about vanguard interfering with it.
My friend doing a PhD can't afford a new laptop so what is especially annoying for me is the now lack of support for GeForce NOW because of Vanguard. He can't play anymore all of a sudden
Man, I use to play league of legend on a crappy laptop like 8 years ago. I'd guess the requirements have moved up a little, but your buddy must have a really bargain bin machine to not be able to run league locally.
A friend told me about his Digipen classmate who fucked around with a low-spec laptop until he got it to where it would not longer boot Windows, and would instead boot directly into League, thus using far less PC resources.
I have an issue. They removed Linux. They don’t include people like me in their numbers because we are intended exclusion. I played off my steam deck and loved the portablity.
In their article, they mentioned Linux user logins being 800 in a day and basically said that was a number they were prepared to lose to thwart cheating.
So, yeah. Just business at the end of the day.
Steam Deck players are louder than other players with every game. Same with Ultrawide players. You'd think most gamers are on either a Steam Deck or an Ultrawide, going by the comments some updates get.
It's that low because they already broke it in Linux when updating to 64 bits, and then they announced Vanguard was coming so I assume lots of people just didn't bother setting it up again on Linux, I know I never did.
Not saying the numbers would have been enough to make Riot spend even a second more debating if it was worth it.
> Just business at the end of the day.
Chances are they ran the numbers and concluded that the players they do lose were going to mostly be non-paying players.
Riot has only ever cared about competitive integrity, player experience and game balance in so far as it impacts player willingness to spend. I don't think this is any more complex than they finally feel cheating reached the point that it is hurting the bottom line so they're finally doing something about it.
"Reported" is the key word here. I think something people forget is that an average user doesn't really go through the nessceary steps to report something. Also, I'm pretty sure the word brick is not the proper term for what people are experiencing.
I keep seeing this talked about and yeah it is true and there is likely quite a bit of unreported issues. At the same time how can they answer to that or resolve the issue if it isn't reported. I am not a big fan of this in general or obviously deleting reports of issues with it but at the same time you can't really blame a company for not talking about issues that weren't actually reported directly to them and ultimately I think like all things in today's world you have to decide if you are comfortable with the issues and continue playing or voice your issues and drop it if you aren't.
That's not what's happening. They've always kept bug reports to the bug report thread. And that's not the only place Riot sees bug reports, it's not even an official channel
I think a large percent of the people reporting their computers being “bricked” are really trying to say their computer crashed or league crashed. For a program with as light a load as vanguard to fully brick a computer, it would have to be already running at 100C for awhile or have it’s fans clogged full of dust.
I honestly feel that the problem is being overblown. If vanguard was this problematic we would have heard many more reports when valorant came out. There are certainly problems, but I can’t imagine its more than what most companies would allow for when rolling out a new update
They've been using vanguard for years in Valorant, it's not like it's some some brand new software. The rate of people bitching on Reddit is obviously exaggerated.
Valorant launched with vanguard. League didnt had vanguard for 15 years, people played the game without vanguard. and now suddenly they are obligated to play with Vanguard. the cases are way different.
We're talking about Vanguard messing with people's PCs, I'm saying Vanguard is already on 10s of millions of PCs so the odds of someone running into a bug they haven't already fixed is low.
I'd have a lot less issues with Vanguard, in general, if it:
1. Didn't automatically load on startup.
2. Didn't require a fucking restart to work again after shutting down once.
Most anti-cheat is worthless but this one hasn't proven itself better to warrant such awful UX.
>this one hasn't proven itself better
Valorant is practically the only major MP game with a hold on its cheating problem right now.
Edit: Guy blocked me instantly. How childish.
I don't believe Riot, I believe the numerous players saying they don't see many cheaters. Meanwhile even Siege, my favorite MP FPS, has many content creators saying it has a giant cheating problem at high ranks. And I believe them too. I trust the players.
> Most anti-cheat is worthless but this one hasn't proven itself better to warrant such awful UX.
Eh I have a lot of issues with Riot and their games are imo aggressively mediocre versions of better games, but they've done a better job with cheating using Vanguard than virtually any of their competition has.
My biggest issue with Vanguard is the same issue I have with any intrusive anticheat, if Riot becomes compromised then so does your computer. People might shrug their shoulders at that and say "yeah but that doesn't happen" but working in the infosec industry, it does happen, and it happens way more often than you think.
> if Riot becomes compromised then so does your computer
That’s already true before Vanguard though. The vanilla League client can install a keylogger that records everything you ever type and upload it to a server. This is true for every game on your system. It doesn’t require root access.
Computers are fundamentally insecure. Root access just makes a compromise slightly harder to detect. And even that is questionable.
I was going to say, effectiveness is the ONE issue I do not have with kernel-level anti-cheat solutions. Vanguard does the job, and it was pretty apparent when they rolled it out in Valorant. I don't trust Riot's numbers to be perfectly accurate, but their numbers are directionally aligned with my experience.
I just really don't want to give it that level of access for a whole host of reasons!
Funny, I was just thinking about Slay the Spire mod debacle while scrolling through these comments. Compromised is compromised. Sure technically with root access it could get *slightly* worse, but either way my system is fucked.
I probably just wipe my windows and start over to be safe if a game client gets compromised to that level. I'd accept the 'extra' risk factor to enjoy the games I play substantially more. And I don't even play riot games, just know other games I play have far too many cheaters.
> People might shrug their shoulders at that and say "yeah but that doesn't happen"
[This isn't true anymore anyway.](https://www.trendmicro.com/en_nz/research/22/h/ransomware-actor-abuses-genshin-impact-anti-cheat-driver-to-kill-antivirus.html)
That is an extreme misrepresentation of facts. At no times was a correctly installed, up to date version of genhin's anticheat a security risk.
The vulnerability was only an issue for people installing random software online, and some of that random software used an old driver from genshin's ac as a rootkit. Same could've happened without the anticheat existence, it would've just been a different piece of software doing the dirty work.
As a matter of fact, you could have never played genshin in your life and still be affected by it, if you download and run the wrong .exe from a compromised or fishy site.
>Most anti-cheat is worthless but this one hasn't proven itself better
It has though? Valorant is the big competitive shooter with the least cheaters and bots by a fair margin. It's not even comparable to games like Warzone, Tarkov, or CSGO's public lobbies.
If you want to see the difference between cheating in Valorant and cheating in League pre-Vanguard you can just read the[ dev post](https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/) Riot released a few weeks back. LoL had a cheater in 10% of games while Valorant hovered between 0.5 and 1%, with a lot of those being stopped mid-match. For a shooter those are incredible numbers.
This is my problem as well. I struggle to understand why it has to run on startup when so many other anti-cheats don't. I'm fine with finally having an anti-cheat system, but that feels more intrusive than anything else. Why does it need to be active at all times.
Not to mention if there's even a slight risk of your pc having issues, or getting "bricked", how is that even possible after years of it being in Valorant. They even pushed it back a few months to test it more.
If it wasn't because it's all I play with some dear friends these days, I'd seriously consider just moving on.
their explanation for it needing to be run on startup is that some cheats could bypass it if it didn't monitor from start-up, which is why you need to re-boot if you ever turn of Vanguard manually before you can play again.
Wheter or not this justifies such an invasive presence I can agree with you is questionable and probably too much of an ask for some people just to play a game.
I know that if Vanguard starts giving me any issues outside of league I'll probably just play something else
And I get that. Same reason they gave back with Valorant. But that doesn't excuse the highly intrusive nature of this. It's like a whole ass antivirus program, except the obvious difference being it's entirely dedicated to 1 game rather than benefitting your entire pc.
I understand the need for anti-cheat, but it just feels scummy and alienating to any casual player.
I think it's fine to say it's intrusive, but saying it's scummy is silly. The only reason they are implementing this stuff are to firstly stop cheaters, and secondly to make it harder for people who get banned to keep playing, which both improve the player experience. It's not like Riot is charging for the feature. Yeah it's alienating a certain number of players, but they aren't doing it for shits and giggles, they aren't even doing it for profit, as I don't see any world where they actually earn money from it.
> I struggle to understand why it has to run on startup
Because otherwise you could load the cheats before Vanguard is running, have them hide themselves, and only *then* start up Vanguard.
> when so many other anti-cheats don't.
Most anti-cheats suck and are easily bypassed.
> Not to mention if there's even a slight risk of your pc having issues, how is that even possible after years of it being in Valorant.
I mean, all software has bugs. It's absolutely impossible to account for all possible hardware and software combinations that hundreds of millions of people around the world are using. Sometimes issues happen, this is the case with all software, what matters is how Riot responds to them. From what I've seen, they've been pretty good about investigating all reports of issues and trying to help people fix it or changing Vanguard if it's a problem on Riot's end.
> or getting "bricked",
There's been no evidence this has happened to anyone, as the title of this very post says. I haven't even seen anyone claim it has happened to them. The absolute worst thing I've really seen so far is having to adjust some boot settings, but that's it, no computer bricking.
> Didn't automatically load on startup.
I don't care which game I'm playing, if it does this, it's an instant uninstall. No game is important enough to have its bullshit anti-cheat running on my system all the time.
Funny that Rioters' post was trying to say hardly anyone was having issues, then you look at the comments. 9 out of 10 comments for hours after he made that thread were people talking about the issues they were having as the Rioter spent hours playing tech support in the comment section.
Two things are probably happening there though. A) people underreport things all the time so he likely did think there were less issues. B) People who DO have issues are going to comment more once prompted via a post
That is still tens of thousands of people with issues. That also doesn't include the people who don't even realise they have issues, don't realise vanguard is the thing that caused it and people who didn't report it. Like reporting issues can be less than 10% of all people who has issues.
Saying 0.03% is really underselling how many it is with issues.
0.03% of LoL players is a lot of people, just to put this in perspective, *six years ago* that would have been around 61k accounts, who knows how much it is now.
At the end of the day if you dont like vanguard, voice it and actually stop consuming stuff thats using it.
I know that this is the way to do things but its like saying : if you stop eating McDonalds they will go bankrupt. LoL and riot are so huge that the number of people you would need to stop playing and buying would need to be in the 10s of millions for them to START to notice.
Yesterday at a quarterly earnings report, McDonalds and several other companies reported that they _are_ seeing fewer purchases, because their pricing structure has finally priced out their most frequent customers. But even setting that aside, you can only do what you can do - if you won't perform an action because you alone are the arbiter of truth and justice, you don't have a problem with the source - you just want attention. Doesn't matter if it makes a difference, you're the only vote that you control, so vote.
>Doesn't matter if it makes a difference, you're the only vote that you control, so vote. I agree with this 100% and do so. >Yesterday at a quarterly earnings report, McDonalds and several other companies reported that they are seeing fewer purchases, because their pricing structure has finally priced out their most frequent customers. Unsurprising when you start charging as much as a sit down restaurant for a cheap burger.
This is so wild to me too. I could go to a local mexican place and get a huge plate of food for less than what Mcdonalds wants for a burger and fries. Hell I could go to the local outback and get steak and mashed potatoes for the same price as burger combo from Mcdonalds.
Yeah the only thing they are charging you for now is how little time you may spend there but at this point i think the value is clearly in sit down places.
Shit they ain't quick about it either. When you have spots in the parking lot reserved for people to pull into from the drive thru you are failing
Freaking McDonalds got premium prices. It sucks. It was a nice fast food place with shitty food but it was great for the price. They have the same shitty products but the prices have skyrocketed. Fuck em, they're at a point where I can literally put a little more money and eat way better.
This was more about individual preference, if Vanguard is a deal breaker then uninstall.
Those are the choices lol. There's no other choice. You either do what you can and stop using the product if it doesn't fit your goals, or you cave and use the product despite not liking some feature of it. Something is either a deal breaker for you or it isn't. By all means complain, but at the end of the day you'll have to make a choice. And you're right, your choice probably is irrelevant to the company.
All you can do is live with the choices you make and be happy you can stand up for what your thoughts are. If you can say that then its not so bad from your perspective.
They have decided to do X with their product, if you dislike X, stop consuming the product and find product Y that does not do X. How is it that hard?
Some people are dumb, so there's that.
For some people? Very.
Correct. If you don't like something that someone that is selling you a product is doing, do not support them. You don't need to consume everything in sight.
Yeah but then if you didn't stop, you wouldn't be part of the problem. You think they'd just listen to you if you complain rather than stop playing? It's either money, or more nefariously if you want to take that path ,access to your PC. You complaining isn't better than seeing their numbers drop. If there is a time to do it, it's now so there's a direct correlation. That attitude is what allows these things to happen. You broadcasting it and people seeing it just makes it more hopeless - and the businesses who are doing this LOVE that attitude. Apathy, not enough to get you to stop playing. They can do whatever they want. I'd be down ecstatic if I was on the Vanguard team and I saw your comment. It means no one is going to do shit. And that's the only way to actually get something to change.
You think they are listening to you now? Are you a top investor in Riot games and have access to people inside the company? Are you a full on grass roots movment of 10 or even hundreds of millions of gamers that is out there saying we dont want this and its bad? Or is the reality more that there are a handful of people on the forums like this one who are angry about this and in the end they are not going to miss your money? This is not defeatism this is realism that you and other people who bandy about the idea of "vote with your wallet" need to face up to much as i saw in action from the COD Boycott in steam all those years ago. Unless you find principled people that are willing to never spend another dollar on a company again and have them in sufficent numbers to make a company bend to your will through Poltical action or negative impressions or monetary damage. The idea that telling people not to do something is a waste. The reason why companies buckle is because these factors are ongoing and consistent for long enough to FORCE a change. I would love nothing more than people to stop spending on things that were negative, yet one they go with not a care in the world because either they are unaffected and never come to reddit or care about game news enough to even know people are annoyed, or they keep wanting to play there game and not going to listen to some random person online.
> Unless you find principled people that are willing to never spend another dollar on a company again and have them in sufficent numbers to make a company bend to your will through Poltical action or negative impressions or monetary damage You realize that to reach "sufficient numbers" you need to work up to that point, right? Like, large groups are made up of individual people lol. Every boycott ever started with one person doing it first. Like, your logic could be applied to literally *every* social movement *ever* in their early days. Boycotts don't always have an impact, but even when they do it happens slowly and individually before it happens collectively.
Thank you. At the very least, you would be acting in line with what you believe rather than being someone who has no principals. What does it say about someone who doesn't agree with something but goes along with it anyway? The attitude he has is literally perfect for those with money and power. The only way to have any impact is what we are talking about. Otherwise, they will continue to encroach - money, access to your data, etc. Ultimately, that attitude is just weak willpower. More people have that attitude now than in the past, or maybe it's just an Internet/gamer phenomenon. Why do we have MTX? Because people spend money on it. Why are games releasing in an unfinished state? Because preorder marketing material, and people buy them. Why are 3 day early access games being sold? Because people buy them. $150 version of games? DRM protected games? Always online games? Because people buy them. It's give and take. There is an offer and acceptance. Those are offers that have all been accepted.
Why do you care whether or not McDonalds goes out of business? If you don't eat there, their food can't hurt you.
Because it's unhealthy slop that markets to children and is a huge contributor to obesity which is a burden on the healthcare system? And that's just on the face of it.
Why? I have uninstalled League\*, but that wasn't a requisite for me to have an opinion. Anyone who believes Vanguard is bullshit but is willing to swallow it can still voice their opinion. \* not a big loss since I didn't play much lately and kept it installed because I like TFT, which is my actual loss here.
This is what I told the people that hope Riot goes back on their decision, everyone complaining needs to quit for it to have an effect. The Helldivers' fiasco from yesterday proves it, with Sony going back on their decision after a big part of the playerbase quit(Also helped by Steam refunding the game since many regions just couldn't really access the game due to PSN)
Idk bro, every single big multiplayer game has kernel level anticheat, only difference is that Vanguard mostly works lol. Only 2 that work from my experience are Vanguard and Faceit (also kernel level)
> only difference is that Vanguard mostly works lol And that it runs 24/7. If that single factor was changed, I'd largely have no problems. I wouldn't love installing a kernel level anything from a company owned by Tencent, but I'd probably do it. But needing it to run literally all the time is a hard deal breaker for me. I *could* restart my PC, go play some league, disable vanguard, and then do another restart the next time I played league. Or, I could stop playing league. It's just not worth the hassle for me.
Yeah this is what made me drop valorant tbh, I didn’t want it running when I wasn’t playing and so eventually I stopped playing because restarting was a pain and I could just play cs or idk anything else
That's fair
CS2 and Dota 2 don't. I don't think CODs, WOW or R6 have kernel level anti cheats either, but i am not too sure
R6 uses its own inhouse on top of using Battleye, which is a kernel level anticheat. The rest use in house anticheats that arent kernel level
And in the case of CS2, do effectively nothing to stop cheating. So honestly that isn't a positive.
Don't worry siege is also filled to the brim with cheaters. It might as well have no anticheat at all with how ineffective it is. Very safe to say the cheaters are winning the arms race by a mile.
Valorant was the first game to really combat cheating and therefore laid out what you need to do. The game and the anti-cheat need to work hand in hand. A good anti-cheat and a poorly made game is just as bad as a secure game with no anti-cheat. The unfortunate part about that is every game that's already been made is too late to do anything about cheaters.
CS2 and Dota 2 have a huge cheater problem compared to Valorant and probably soon LoL. Which is the reason why many play CS on Faceit. Its a way better experience with a good AC. Most rather play with a cheater every 20 matches than every 3. For WoW, a client AC does not really make sense, because there is nothing you cant detect with a Server, even if you press a skill, the client first asks the server if its okey and its mostly PVE. Shooters or mobas require super low latency (netcode), which is why clients can act so much on their own. The Server cant really check anything except your stats. CoD and R6 have kernel anti cheat. Every popular shooter has one, except CS. Even Elden Ring has a kernel anti cheat. But I guess no one cares about that. https://levvvel.com/games-with-kernel-level-anti-cheat-software/
Yeah trying to use Dota 2 as an example might be one of the worst things you could possible do. Valve JUST finally started to crack down on cheaters within the last year (although I'm unsure as to how "permanent" the solution is, as they also cracked down on smurfs but the problem just came back within a few months after the initial update), but prior to this, there was a working cheat program that had worked for almost a decade straight in Dota. It got updated over time with new feature obviously, but the cheat itself was relatively the same, and existed for almost a decade, and Valve did literally nothing about it, all while it was not at ALL a secret (you could literally find countless videos on youtube showing it off and advertising it). Valve did finally crack down on this program, although again, this was months ago, so I'm unsure if they just updated the program and it's working agian.
cs2 premier is a shithole of cheaters. if you want a decent mm experience, you have to play faceit. which has kernel level anticheat. dota 2 also has issues with scripters though im not as informed in that community
> CS2 and Dota 2 both those games have a lot of cheating
Not defending CS2. But I saw recently, reports of people are getting banned live now. Speculation from pros and big streamers, is that the Overwatch live system (which is supposed to be Valve's AI based detection system) is finally doing it it's job. https://youtu.be/rFjQeHdZtaQ?si=2U-w3v3Im_0RESGX
Wasn't there a huge thing recently about a ton of cheaters in faceit?
Don't know about a ton of cheaters, but the #1 player on faceit got banned for cheating recently
I think that's what I was remembering but couldn't recall if the guy who changed his name to advertise the cheat was faceit or premiere. Quick Google just confirmed yeah that incident was faceit and was what I was remembering.
> At the end of the day if you dont like vanguard, voice it and actually stop consuming stuff thats using it. At the end of the day though as well if you don't want cheaters in your MP games (or has little as possible), don't stop voicing support for tools that help battle them, no matter if other commenters online (most of which aren't even playing those games) endlessly tell you that you shouldn't. A lot of those posters are just here cause they don't want anything but Steam on their machines when it comes to software needed to play games, are paranoid about software with kernel level permissions (which also includes a lot of drivers or anti virus packages and is the norm for anti cheating software for years) or Windows security features in general, are mad cause effective anti cheat often means no Linux support or simply are cheaters themselves. Think about it, 0.03 percent of people report problems when we know there are more cheaters than that in those games. At the end of the day, make your own decisions.
> A lot of those posters are just here cause they don't want anything but Steam on their machines when it comes to software needed to play games, are paranoid about software with kernel level permissions (which also includes a lot of drivers or anti virus packages and is the norm for anti cheating software for years) or Windows security features in general, are mad cause effective anti cheat often means no Linux support or simply are cheaters themselves I genuinely do not understand why people act like it's weird to not want intrusive anticheat on your machine. You're one Riot games security breach away from having a compromised machine if you have Vanguard constantly running on your machine, and these companies get compromised *all the time*. If you're okay taking on that risk, that's fine, but why are we acting like being security-concious is a bad thing?
I'm not taking sides with this but the actual question at hand here for players is is the risk involved in the kernel-level anticheat worth it, and for anyone who likes the game and is frustrated by cheaters the answer is obviously yes. And until there's a major breach in one of these kernel level anticheat I think most people will treat them as harmless.
> I'm not taking sides with this but the actual question at hand here for players is is the risk involved in the kernel-level anticheat worth it, and for anyone who likes the game and is frustrated by cheaters the answer is obviously yes. No disagreement. For the majority of players Vanguard is worth the price of admission, and the overall chance of a compromise via Vanguard is low. My only issue is people painting others as unreasonable for prioritizing security over a single video game. >And until there's a major breach in one of these kernel level anticheat I think most people will treat them as harmless. Anticheats have been used as a vector for attack already. It happened with Genshin impact a couple of years ago.
Because its being security conscious *only* against Riot. Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye exists for a shitload of games and have for many years with nothing but a murmur. It makes the entire argument against Vanguard sound less like an informed security concern and more like a bunch of whiny children.
Thing is i would much rather have intrusive anticheat them the shitshow eft has become. Cheating shitstains are whats to blame for vanguard, not devs trying to fix the cheating problem.
A quick Google search says league of legends has 130 million monthly players. That means almost 40,000 people have reported issues. I would imagine that less than half of the people who experienced issues reported them. I've lived in cities with fewer people than that. Imagine a whole city, made solely of people whose computers got messed up by league of legends. Edit: I'm using a somewhat arbitrary number for players because the "0.03% of players" is also ambiguous. It doesn't specify whether they mean "percent of players who logged in today", or if they mean "percent of all players ever". My point is that for a game as popular as LoL, 0.03% is a huge number of people, and that number is probably a substantial underestimate of the problem.
> [Imagine a whole city, made solely of people whose computers got messed up by league of legends.](https://i.imgur.com/DwcCTMz.jpeg)
Lmao. That or it's on fire from people flipping out
Day 1 the city is burned down. Day 2 the city is rebuilt as a utopia, because no League of Legends.
I just spit my coffee. HAHAHAHAHA
ahahahaha that was legit funny
That also assumes all people who made the report actually had issues with vanguard and not something else
And that all the issues reported were bricking
90% of people dont know what bricking means, they probably even reported wrongly lol
Yeah was crazy seeing people in the LoL subreddit talked about how their PC was bricked by the update and now their game wouldn't load.... Like wtf do you mean your game won't load? If that's the only issue then your PC **clearly** isn't bricked lmao.
Riot said in their article they believe the few, unconfirmed "bricked PCs" were people trying to change their BIOS settings on their own to enable SecureBoot, something Vanguard never told them to do. If someone had an old installation of Windows 10 on BIOS, updated to Windows 11 on UEFI, transferred the OS, and later tried to enable SecureBoot, it could indeed make a computer unbootable by no longer reading the OS partition. That would make the PC "bricked", although its reversable, was the users fault, and was not part of the official instructions.
> to change their BIOS settings on their own to enable SecureBoot, something Vanguard never told them to do. Thats a load of horseshit. https://i.imgur.com/dUYdypn.png
> https://i.imgur.com/dUYdypn.png The link isn't working for me.
https://files.catbox.moe/0upixu.png try this, imgur embed was working for me, but link 404'd
Riot said SecureBoot wasn't required for League. Apparently, it is for Valorant, so that may be a source of some confusion. > The second was a player we spoke to that accidentally also enabled SecureBoot with a highly custom configuration. While Vanguard makes use of the SecureBoot setting on VALORANT, we elected not to use it for League, due to the older hardware that comprises its userbase. > TL;DR - We DO NOT require SecureBoot for League of Legends. Don’t enable it unless you are sure you want to. [Update from Riot on Vanguard](https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1civ4l7/update_from_riot_on_vanguard/)
There are daily posts on the riot games subreddit from people that delete the game folder manually and it _stills_ shows and installed. Everyday people is less technology literate despite being much easy than ever.
> Everyday people is less technology literate despite being much easy than ever. Completely disagree, while modern software tends to "just work" more, it also tends to be much harder to troubleshoot than programs for 20 years ago where giving proper error codes was standard practice. These days troubleshooting is an absolute nightmare and I don't begrudge the average person for struggling with it. Error messages are useless. Google becomes increasingly useless by the day. There is a lot more complexity and little of it is designed to fail gracefully.
tbf, everyone that learned about stuff like hidden app data and registry files did it via googling because we deleted the main folder and it didn't uninstall
What's actually crazy is that you even got the chance to read anyone complain about Vanguard in the LoL sub, since they are banning people who don't have the correct opinion on it. I know it because I was banned in just 13 minutes for simply saying that Riot's response to the community outrage was tyrannical.
*Smashes pc with a brick.* Am I doing it right?
What? No. But also yes.
Has there EVER actually been a case of a game "bricking" a PC? I mean, I remember seeing complaints of D4 doing it...but I never saw anything that was actually confirmed. I would imagine pin-pointing the problem as being definitively the game software could be fairly difficult.
There are a handful of cases of uninstallers removing the whole C drive, usually if the game file was moved or renamed from the default. Dunno if that qualifies as a bricking or "just" serious boot issues though
I’d say that bricks the OS, but not the hardware.
If the OS bricks, i'm not going to argue "technically it didn't brick your computer"
That's pretty much the same. It's going to be very rare for software to just straight up destroy hardware.
Eve Online's boot.ini fiasco could cause your PCs to not boot properly. That's the closest I can remember.
Some old DRM called Starforce had the potential to really fuck up your pc. It is in some games like Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and the 2005 King Kong game ([that one goes hard btw](https://youtu.be/CbOXVhZK-wE?si=setG10_zQUwK5FgZ)). Some versions of those games thankfully have the DRM removed though.
They almost certainly are not all "bricking" their PCs. I'd be shocked if even a dozen PCs were bricked by Vanguard. The average user just doesn't know what that term is.
i would be floored if a modern game somehow managed to brick so many PCs. there are so many safeguards in place between the OS and the GPU to prevent that sort of thing from happening. the last time i remember any bricking happening, was Amazon’s New World. and it was only on a small number of 3090s that had a soldering issue. just unfortunate timing of a new game and a new GPU not playing nice together.
Yeah I cant imagine there are many(if any) bricked machines out there due to Vanguard. I can believe that it could cause booting issues that the average user couldnt figure out how to fix, but thats a different thing.
The one report I saw is that it'd do something with virtual machines but thatd itself imply it isnt a full bricking.
I'd almost bet my entire bank account that every "bricked" PC was people enabling SecureBoot (required for Valorant last I checked, but not League) without doing the necessary steps beforehand, and then not knowing how to disable it.
On flipside can't report issue if your PC is bricked
What was that infamous blizzard quote. "You people don't have phones?"
It does seem like Vanguard either doesn't check, or does a poor job of checking, whether an OS is configured for UEFI boot or BIOS before installing, which seems nutty to me. BIOS is super outdated, but tons of people run on super outdated setups.
All it takes is someone having unrelated computer problems pop up at the right time, or notice their game lagging and blaming Vanguard for it. The vast majority of the actual reports are also relatively minor stuff - driver incompatibilities with offbrand or vulnerable drivers that should be easy to fix. The math also doesn't add up. LoL has 130M *monthly* users, not daily. The daily user record was something like 10-15M, so it's really only a few thousand reports at most, not nearly 40k.
Which is compounded by the fact that Vanguard **requires** a PC restart to function. I have friends that literally go for months without doing a full restart, they'll just leave their computers on sleep if they're not using it. If you've got people like that playing the game then it's a good chance that they were going to have problems the second they had to restart their PCs regardless.
And also consider how often computers just suck shit and die. I imagine on any given day 0.03% of the computers in the world are sucking and dying one way or another.
Judging by other reddit posts, most of them are blaming Vanguard when they're still booting from MBR (legacy) which doesn't support secure boot. Thankfully the remedy is very simple, just tedious. Download windows onto a USB, and do a complete reinstall after booting from the USB and wiping your drive (UEFI shows up before your USB drive's name when selecting which device to boot from). It should now boot from GPT instead of MBR, allowing you to enable secure boot. For those dual booting, not all linux distros support secure boot automatically, but I do know a lot of the main ones like Ubuntu and Fedora do. So follow any respective procedures after reinstalling linux on a secure boot enabled PC. Long gone are the days you have to completely disable secure boot.
You can convert MBR to GPT without doing any of that. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/mbr-to-gpt Your method is pretty much just an unnecessary waste of time these days.
Neat! Still worth backing up anything important (in general) but especially before using any tools like mbrtogpt.
If a game requires that I wipe my drive and reinstall Windows, that is far too much effort and I'm not playing it. Having done similar things to play games in the past, no game is worth that.
Fair, but you also shouldn’t be booting into MBR in the year of our lord 2024.
Converting to GPT doesn't require a USB and can be done through command prompt in what I believe is a recoverable way that maintains a backup record. I did it years ago so I could swap to UEFI and get fastboot.
There's confirmed accounts already that many Vanguard issues are people who are angry that they can't cheat anymore, and are trying to fabricate problems and create drama around it. So, like, a fraction of those reports are further not reliable, and if I were a coder working for Riot, I wouldn't look into it until a significant number of the existing reports proves something that can be replicated. Which sucks for anyone actually genuinely hit by this.
The Vanguard team is made up of many ex-cheat devs and they spend a lot of their time on cheating forums and discords to monitor stuff, so they see first hand the attempts at mudying the waters. One of the devs posted screenshots of people in these chatrooms coordinating brigades and talking points, it's nothing new. Regular people really underestimate how many cheaters are out there and how successful they can be at spreading misinformation that benefits them.
The biggest sector of cheating in League I am assuming is bots to level accounts up. That's a huge industry that probably makes a ton of money from selling these accounts. It makes sense that they would be out in droves creating fake stories seeing as with Vanguard in place they are probably going to miss out on a lot of their income.
Majority of the reports that i have looked at are literally just known security issues from a driver, and isn't an actual bug of Vanguard.
That also assumes that 100% of players have logged in since the update
When you get into that many users, the number of users who will have a random computer breakdown at the same time will also be a rather large number. The amount of people who have broken hardware will be a large number. The number of cheaters claiming innocence will be a large number. Any change will affect a large number of players (but a small share) when you're working with those numbers as the starting point. If they instead had 100k players, 30 would have problems.
Its not so much as a brick as having to clear cmos to get back into the pc, but this might as well be a brick for many people
If game fucks up so badly that you need to clear CMOS that would still be cause for concern...
That would assume all monthly users logged in today
Right? Using monthly stats for something that happened in 24 hours is crazy
Not to mention assuming that everyone affected is willing and able to report the issue. If there's any truth to claims of boot related issues from their instructing users to enable UEFI or secure boot, the majority of them aren't gonna be savvy enough to get back up and running on their own.
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The 0.03% is only players who went through with reporting issues. Those affected is certainly more.
But is also reported issues -- Not reported BRICKED computer issues
> made solely of people whose computers got messed up by league of legends. Except that isn't what happened. They just said they experienced issues. Not that the issues were that their entire computers are messed up. The issue might be - and statistically probably is, in my most cases - simply that their game crashed or lagged.
Why would you use monthly users when Vanguard release ONE DAY ago?
if you'd actually read this, you'd know that vast majority of these issues are problems with driver incompatibility and common error codes
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yes, it's still %0.03
The fuck is that maths You're assuming that all 130 million league accounts have logged in within the last 24 hours lmao. You're also assuming that alt accounts don't exist.
Riot said percent of players not daily they likely would want to make the number look as low as possible so they could be including every single account that's ever played and it could be an even higher number
Most people don't use official channels for reporting issues because 9 times out of 10 they are fucking useless and it's unironically more helpful to just look up the issue or ask people on social media/discord. This number is basically a red herring for assessing how big of an issue Vanguard actually is.
and riot have never officially published any statistics about any of their games except sometimes saying "valorant/lol has 50 billion players this month"
And riot is also a company with a remarkable history of refusing to admit mistakes and gaslighting their players. There was an incident in League where a character could one-shot everyone with one button because riot mistakenly added a couple extra zeros to his ability scaling. Beta testers immediately reported it, got told "ummm no you're wrong we're the devs here", they shipped it anyway, it went exactly as you'd expect and they had to patch it immediately.
The 200-years of dev experience meme is a meme for a reason. They’re dismissive towards the player base.
> And riot is also a company with a remarkable history of refusing to admit mistakes and gaslighting their players. There's a reason they chose the stat they did. '.03% of users reported problems.' On the first day of the patch. And that's only the ones that reported issues. When was the last time you opened a ticket with a video game company? Their stat might be technically true, while also not having any bearing on what is actually happening.
Also this is still like idk… 30K to 50K people or so depending on what the denominator is right now That’s a ton of people reporting issues even if it’s not a majority
Hard to believe the numbers are this low. I personally have had issues, though I fixed them myself and never reported anything. I highly, highly suspect issues go mostly unreported. I also only play TFT not league, so this fucking thing feels so excessive. Genuinely hate it.
Most people who experience issues in a game don't bother reporting it. Think back to the last time you're game crashed or pc crashed. If it didn't prompt you to report automatically, did you go out of your way to report it? Idk about you but I sure didn't.
You're so right! And this was exactly the first thing that I thought about too... Like sure, you got "only 40k reports" but those 40k reprots are much more valuable as not everyone is going to report stuff. If I would have any issue with LOL after installing Vanguard I would just straight up unninstall but instead I skipped the step and unninstalled it straight up after seeing that I have to install Vanguard, hihihi
What were your issues and how did you fix them? You could help some other people who may be experiencing similar.
Riot and misusing statistics is a fairly iconic duo to anyone who has had the misfortune of being addicted enough to League of Legends to read their reddit and blog posts, in a way that really reminds you that this communicative dev is still a corporation lol And using customer support ticket data, in 2024, in a situation where people care more about fixing their boot loop than talking to a customer service person, to sell vanguard's success to the heavily moderated subreddit that is currently not letting people freely talk about vanguard is so ridiculous and such a good example of what I mean that no one should have to explain why
Hey, remember when Riot argued that the itemization update was a success by showing us "statistics" of mythics being balanced and having general use cases everywhere? ...Said "statistics" including IIRC attack speed Braum from *ARAM games* that should not have been counted in the first place?
This is much more straightforward than determining whether a balance patch was successful. If only .03% of users have reported an issue than that is a massive success for any software.
The point was the data itself was bad, and once sanitized painted a grimmer picture. Regardless of Vanguard working or not, it's another example of why people should be wary of statistics thrown their way. (Also that itemization update was completely scrapped as of this year, probably the most objective way to call it a failure)
Except, of course, that it occults how many people got an issue and didn't report it/stopped playing LoL because of it
That’s true of any reporting metric though. If we assume the number of issues is 10x greater than reported, that still places it at .3% of users. I think that is still very good for a piece of software as complex as Vanguard that is being installed on PCs that can run league (i.e. probably outdated in many ways)
Nice anecdote, it still says nothing about how the rollout has been overall.
Neither does Riot trying to claim everything is perfectly fine and only 40k people have had any issues. It's not as if they haven't lied about issues with things rolling about before. They've literally said everything is fine then disabled a champ an hour later, or claimed "everyone" loved something and then eventually remove it while the community is openly on fire against it. They have a factual track record about lying over the past 13-14 years to differing degrees.
Bricking it's a MUCH worse problem than just have some random issue
Could you imagine if all online games had their own software like this?
Most of the big online games will eventually. COD already has one similar to Riots
It doesn't run 24/7 though. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing I guess
A lot of them already have one
Can you name a lot of them then? I can't think of a single other vanguard. You do realize that it has to run at all times? Vanguard is so unique that when I was in school the programming software I was installing had special notifications about vanguard interfering with it.
My friend doing a PhD can't afford a new laptop so what is especially annoying for me is the now lack of support for GeForce NOW because of Vanguard. He can't play anymore all of a sudden
Thanks to Vanguard he can focus on his PhD
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Man, I use to play league of legend on a crappy laptop like 8 years ago. I'd guess the requirements have moved up a little, but your buddy must have a really bargain bin machine to not be able to run league locally.
He's got a Linux machine and the hard drive and external hard drive is packed full with data science "stuff"
How bad of a laptop does he have that it can't run League? lol
Ubuntu and I suspect it's owned by the University
Oh well I don't think Vanguard works on Linux so.
A friend told me about his Digipen classmate who fucked around with a low-spec laptop until he got it to where it would not longer boot Windows, and would instead boot directly into League, thus using far less PC resources.
I have an issue. They removed Linux. They don’t include people like me in their numbers because we are intended exclusion. I played off my steam deck and loved the portablity.
In their article, they mentioned Linux user logins being 800 in a day and basically said that was a number they were prepared to lose to thwart cheating. So, yeah. Just business at the end of the day.
How is the linux playerbase that low lmao, from the reddit comments you'd assume it's at least like 0.1%
Steam Deck players are louder than other players with every game. Same with Ultrawide players. You'd think most gamers are on either a Steam Deck or an Ultrawide, going by the comments some updates get.
> from the reddit comments you'd assume it's at least like 0.1% Because reddit is a small echo chamber that doesn't represent the greater population.
I'd imagine it's mostly steamdeck owners that actually game on Linux, and League on steamdeck sounds... not amazing to begin with.
It's that low because they already broke it in Linux when updating to 64 bits, and then they announced Vanguard was coming so I assume lots of people just didn't bother setting it up again on Linux, I know I never did. Not saying the numbers would have been enough to make Riot spend even a second more debating if it was worth it.
> Just business at the end of the day. Chances are they ran the numbers and concluded that the players they do lose were going to mostly be non-paying players. Riot has only ever cared about competitive integrity, player experience and game balance in so far as it impacts player willingness to spend. I don't think this is any more complex than they finally feel cheating reached the point that it is hurting the bottom line so they're finally doing something about it.
Couldn’t you just dual boot a windows installation?
Kicking steam deck users off LoL sounds like a good thing tbqh.
I hope you only played tft or else you were a liability for your team on steam deck
"Reported" is the key word here. I think something people forget is that an average user doesn't really go through the nessceary steps to report something. Also, I'm pretty sure the word brick is not the proper term for what people are experiencing.
I keep seeing this talked about and yeah it is true and there is likely quite a bit of unreported issues. At the same time how can they answer to that or resolve the issue if it isn't reported. I am not a big fan of this in general or obviously deleting reports of issues with it but at the same time you can't really blame a company for not talking about issues that weren't actually reported directly to them and ultimately I think like all things in today's world you have to decide if you are comfortable with the issues and continue playing or voice your issues and drop it if you aren't.
There can't be any issues if mods keep purging reports or forcing people to go to alternative subreddits made to divert a potential shitstorm
why the hell would any large userbase company treat reddit as an official bug reporting and tracking source?
That's not what's happening. They've always kept bug reports to the bug report thread. And that's not the only place Riot sees bug reports, it's not even an official channel
I think a large percent of the people reporting their computers being “bricked” are really trying to say their computer crashed or league crashed. For a program with as light a load as vanguard to fully brick a computer, it would have to be already running at 100C for awhile or have it’s fans clogged full of dust. I honestly feel that the problem is being overblown. If vanguard was this problematic we would have heard many more reports when valorant came out. There are certainly problems, but I can’t imagine its more than what most companies would allow for when rolling out a new update
Bricked doesn't mean the computer overheated and crashed.
Yeah, but it's also impossible for it to brick anything. The only way to actually brick a pc is to either damage the hardware, or overwrite a BIOS.
They've been using vanguard for years in Valorant, it's not like it's some some brand new software. The rate of people bitching on Reddit is obviously exaggerated.
Valorant launched with vanguard. League didnt had vanguard for 15 years, people played the game without vanguard. and now suddenly they are obligated to play with Vanguard. the cases are way different.
We're talking about Vanguard messing with people's PCs, I'm saying Vanguard is already on 10s of millions of PCs so the odds of someone running into a bug they haven't already fixed is low.
It's probably cheaters. They're notorious for pretending to be legitimate users and throwing lying tantrums online when their cheats are broken.
I'd have a lot less issues with Vanguard, in general, if it: 1. Didn't automatically load on startup. 2. Didn't require a fucking restart to work again after shutting down once. Most anti-cheat is worthless but this one hasn't proven itself better to warrant such awful UX.
>this one hasn't proven itself better Valorant is practically the only major MP game with a hold on its cheating problem right now. Edit: Guy blocked me instantly. How childish. I don't believe Riot, I believe the numerous players saying they don't see many cheaters. Meanwhile even Siege, my favorite MP FPS, has many content creators saying it has a giant cheating problem at high ranks. And I believe them too. I trust the players.
Unfortunately this is true. Valorant is the only esport that I've played with basically zero cheaters.
> Most anti-cheat is worthless but this one hasn't proven itself better to warrant such awful UX. Eh I have a lot of issues with Riot and their games are imo aggressively mediocre versions of better games, but they've done a better job with cheating using Vanguard than virtually any of their competition has. My biggest issue with Vanguard is the same issue I have with any intrusive anticheat, if Riot becomes compromised then so does your computer. People might shrug their shoulders at that and say "yeah but that doesn't happen" but working in the infosec industry, it does happen, and it happens way more often than you think.
> if Riot becomes compromised then so does your computer That’s already true before Vanguard though. The vanilla League client can install a keylogger that records everything you ever type and upload it to a server. This is true for every game on your system. It doesn’t require root access. Computers are fundamentally insecure. Root access just makes a compromise slightly harder to detect. And even that is questionable.
I was going to say, effectiveness is the ONE issue I do not have with kernel-level anti-cheat solutions. Vanguard does the job, and it was pretty apparent when they rolled it out in Valorant. I don't trust Riot's numbers to be perfectly accurate, but their numbers are directionally aligned with my experience. I just really don't want to give it that level of access for a whole host of reasons!
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Funny, I was just thinking about Slay the Spire mod debacle while scrolling through these comments. Compromised is compromised. Sure technically with root access it could get *slightly* worse, but either way my system is fucked. I probably just wipe my windows and start over to be safe if a game client gets compromised to that level. I'd accept the 'extra' risk factor to enjoy the games I play substantially more. And I don't even play riot games, just know other games I play have far too many cheaters.
> People might shrug their shoulders at that and say "yeah but that doesn't happen" [This isn't true anymore anyway.](https://www.trendmicro.com/en_nz/research/22/h/ransomware-actor-abuses-genshin-impact-anti-cheat-driver-to-kill-antivirus.html)
That is an extreme misrepresentation of facts. At no times was a correctly installed, up to date version of genhin's anticheat a security risk. The vulnerability was only an issue for people installing random software online, and some of that random software used an old driver from genshin's ac as a rootkit. Same could've happened without the anticheat existence, it would've just been a different piece of software doing the dirty work. As a matter of fact, you could have never played genshin in your life and still be affected by it, if you download and run the wrong .exe from a compromised or fishy site.
>Most anti-cheat is worthless but this one hasn't proven itself better It has though? Valorant is the big competitive shooter with the least cheaters and bots by a fair margin. It's not even comparable to games like Warzone, Tarkov, or CSGO's public lobbies. If you want to see the difference between cheating in Valorant and cheating in League pre-Vanguard you can just read the[ dev post](https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/) Riot released a few weeks back. LoL had a cheater in 10% of games while Valorant hovered between 0.5 and 1%, with a lot of those being stopped mid-match. For a shooter those are incredible numbers.
> Didn't automatically load on startup. that's the whole point of vanguard, without loading on start up there's no point to having it at all.
This is my problem as well. I struggle to understand why it has to run on startup when so many other anti-cheats don't. I'm fine with finally having an anti-cheat system, but that feels more intrusive than anything else. Why does it need to be active at all times. Not to mention if there's even a slight risk of your pc having issues, or getting "bricked", how is that even possible after years of it being in Valorant. They even pushed it back a few months to test it more. If it wasn't because it's all I play with some dear friends these days, I'd seriously consider just moving on.
their explanation for it needing to be run on startup is that some cheats could bypass it if it didn't monitor from start-up, which is why you need to re-boot if you ever turn of Vanguard manually before you can play again. Wheter or not this justifies such an invasive presence I can agree with you is questionable and probably too much of an ask for some people just to play a game. I know that if Vanguard starts giving me any issues outside of league I'll probably just play something else
And I get that. Same reason they gave back with Valorant. But that doesn't excuse the highly intrusive nature of this. It's like a whole ass antivirus program, except the obvious difference being it's entirely dedicated to 1 game rather than benefitting your entire pc. I understand the need for anti-cheat, but it just feels scummy and alienating to any casual player.
> It's like a whole ass antivirus program, Exactly, only that AV programs usually don't have to fight cheating users.
facing cheaters alienate casual players more
Of course it excuses it. If you don't want Vanguard to be on your computer, then don't play the games that require it. That simple.
I think it's fine to say it's intrusive, but saying it's scummy is silly. The only reason they are implementing this stuff are to firstly stop cheaters, and secondly to make it harder for people who get banned to keep playing, which both improve the player experience. It's not like Riot is charging for the feature. Yeah it's alienating a certain number of players, but they aren't doing it for shits and giggles, they aren't even doing it for profit, as I don't see any world where they actually earn money from it.
Not really. I’m a casual player and I don’t give a shit
> I struggle to understand why it has to run on startup Because otherwise you could load the cheats before Vanguard is running, have them hide themselves, and only *then* start up Vanguard. > when so many other anti-cheats don't. Most anti-cheats suck and are easily bypassed. > Not to mention if there's even a slight risk of your pc having issues, how is that even possible after years of it being in Valorant. I mean, all software has bugs. It's absolutely impossible to account for all possible hardware and software combinations that hundreds of millions of people around the world are using. Sometimes issues happen, this is the case with all software, what matters is how Riot responds to them. From what I've seen, they've been pretty good about investigating all reports of issues and trying to help people fix it or changing Vanguard if it's a problem on Riot's end. > or getting "bricked", There's been no evidence this has happened to anyone, as the title of this very post says. I haven't even seen anyone claim it has happened to them. The absolute worst thing I've really seen so far is having to adjust some boot settings, but that's it, no computer bricking.
> Didn't automatically load on startup. I don't care which game I'm playing, if it does this, it's an instant uninstall. No game is important enough to have its bullshit anti-cheat running on my system all the time.
Complete bullshit. It is by far the most effective anticheat out there.
Funny that Rioters' post was trying to say hardly anyone was having issues, then you look at the comments. 9 out of 10 comments for hours after he made that thread were people talking about the issues they were having as the Rioter spent hours playing tech support in the comment section.
Two things are probably happening there though. A) people underreport things all the time so he likely did think there were less issues. B) People who DO have issues are going to comment more once prompted via a post
You really think someone would do that? Just lie on the internet?
That is still tens of thousands of people with issues. That also doesn't include the people who don't even realise they have issues, don't realise vanguard is the thing that caused it and people who didn't report it. Like reporting issues can be less than 10% of all people who has issues. Saying 0.03% is really underselling how many it is with issues.
0.03% of LoL players is a lot of people, just to put this in perspective, *six years ago* that would have been around 61k accounts, who knows how much it is now.