Vanguard just went live and LoL players are claiming it's bricking their PCs
dotesports.com
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People complain, but there are a ton of games that use a kernel based anti cheat system that people haven't been flapping their arms around. Valve anti-cheat, EasyCheat etc.
Edit: Valve isn't kernel based, my mistake
You are talking about Vanguard, developed by Riot which is owned by Tencent which is a Chinese company? China has demonstrated enough grip on companies over the years that anything China can directly influence is dubious. China can decide to do something with the installations and has the power to do it in secret. It is significantly harder in western democracies. The relationship between the state and the private enterprises is entirely different.
Valve's VAC is not in the same league with Vanguard from a technical point of view (it is not even kernel based if I'm not mistaken). I would not let that slide either if it was though.
Vanguard itself is developed by a US-based team and they've stated that they have very little to do with Tencent's anti-cheat team (Tencent uses its own solution for the CN region, including for Riots game) beyond sharing cheat samples.
It's not really clear it has, or is. [0] People, at least in the West, don't seem to think watching video games be played is equivalent to watching sport, which is honestly the least surprising thing ever to me, but I guess I'm not a bombastic YouTube 'content creator'.
I think the main problem has nothing to do with eSports, it's simply that average people don't enjoy games that are rigged against them. Ergo, a profit incentive arises to prevent cheating in multiplayer games. And since a separate profit incentive dictates that all games must be online these days, we end up in a situation where I can't play a single-player game of Madden on Linux because it explicitly blocks Wine, [1] presumably to protect the fairness of multiplayer. (Or more cynically, the integrity of the Madden MUT loot pack casino. Profit motives everywhere!)
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/the-streamer-who-spent-dollar1m-on-a...
Except for Sony, lol.
I don't think cheating is something that can be solved by a technology in FPS games, you can do some server side checks but it gets really difficult unless you stream the whole game as a video feed from a remote server. Cheating is a social issue, and we had working solution for it.. dedicated community servers which were community moderated.
That’s hardcore. Sad they couldn’t put that talent to something like self driving…
https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy
I love it because suddenly I can actually compete with the sweatlords who spend every waking moment optimizing their play. I don’t have time for that shit, but I want to have fun.
Downvote away, but game cheating is subversive in the best way possible, and the haters can simply deal with it. I think it’s straight up good for society as it encourages a technological race to the top from others who want to stay competitive. There’s more value in learning how to cheat in a game with respect to learning about computers than there is in playing legitimately. Time spent getting good at a random video game is simply a waste of our precious limited lifespans.
I argue we should legalize doping in sports too. Daniel tosh argued for this famously, pointing out that a bunch of roided beefcakes playing sports is far more entertaining for the average viewer since it improves the quality of play.
> This includes but is not limited to:
> - Gamers who are mentally challenged
Hope it was worth your dignity.
Seriously though, the whole point of ranked matchmaking is to give you a fair game with people who are similar in skill. If you compete without cheating, you will get matched up with other casual players instead of "sweatlords".
A major streamer, pchooly, is known for extreme gamer rage. https://youtu.be/h2ZZh3s2OPA?feature=shared
I like to think that I’ve caused similar poor reactions from upset players.
I just legitimately don't see the appeal. I installed a CoD aimbot way back when, and it just ruined the experience. There is no challenge or satisfaction in winning when it's the tool doing all the work.
I used to play a couple of specific competitive games and get the occasional cheater. It was always a riot to run circles around these people and turn their cheats against them. We had ways of both making the player know that we knew they were cheating and ruin their game, sometimes for hours. I went out of my way to hold these players captive with me so they could not go ruin a new player experience. A service to the gaming society, you see. The more upset and irritated the better. I didn't have to win, I just had to prevent them from winning. It was such fun. Still have a bunch of hatemail from these people and cherish every bit of it. If I didn't get hatemail, I wasn't doing it right.
I really miss those days.
It doesn’t matter about what I am “okay with”, what matters is my power and my capabilities. See the philosophy of max stirner for a deeper explanation.
So I will do what I can to be a game cheater without being detected so that I preserve my advantage and don’t get lumped with other cheaters.
If you’re really powerful, dominate people on a level playing field. I’m thinking you can’t and you’re too weak of mind, will or ability to do so.
Come on man, think this one through a little better.
Why doesn't Microsoft just build a more secure operating system than reaching for Microsoft Defender and other kernel level protection mechanisms. Well because they are but they're not good enough which is exactly the point.
Gamers who use their PC to play games, will install what they can to play such games its a simple as that. Not everyone has the same tolerance to risk.
This is very true.
Highly unpopular opinion: cheating is a social issue and the only future-proof long-term solution is… acceptance and adaptation.
Technology is here to stay. A machine will always outperform unaided humans at some tasks. Don’t make that the point of the competition. The genie is out of the bottle, and save for an apocalyptic event, it won’t ever go back.
Do the contrary. Give every player a state-of-art machine copilot, and let them bring their own improvements to it. This is the only way to make the field truly level again. If your game mechanics is ruined… I’m sorry, but then that - probably - wasn’t a sustainable idea.
People who are called “cheaters” are different. Some exploit bugs and just want to watch the world burn - no sympathy for those folks, fuck them. Some want to trample on everyone without doing anything - no competition here, I don’t get those people (can’t say “fuck them” though - maybe it’s some kind of a trauma they have, so they need that feeling of fake “victory”?). But some want to win, but feel that cannot do so with their bare hands and eyes. So they do what humanity always did - improve by using technology. If they genuinely want to become better - how about we just don’t hate them for this? Heck, the desire to improve through tech is the very foundation of this civilization. (Yes, even if one just buys a cheat program - it still makes sense in any society that had invented money.)
Just rank such players accordingly to their machine-assisted skill. Here, problem solved, and as a bonus you’ll get your next OpenAI Five paper in no time.
I know it’s very controversial. I know some game genres won’t survive (not complex games like LoL or Dota, though). Most likely a lot of MMOs (and most mobile casino junk) will suffer, as a lot of their mechanics is based on boring grind (that’s how they earn money, hah). I know the industry is doing the exact opposite, trying to shove the issue under the rug with bans and memeing super hard that “cheaters” (a derogatory term) are vile scum. And I can see why people are buying it - if the developers say it’s against the rules, no surprise a slightest trace of automation (like a programmable mouse) feels unfair. Reading some Reddit threads I sometimes wonder how those people don’t say that wearing glasses is cheating too. I see that as a conservative approach, and - as anything that merely tries to uphold the status quo - I honestly believe it’s not gonna work in the long term.
No trolling, I honestly believe in what I wrote. And, no, I don’t “cheat” (although I’ve experimented with some basic game hacking, of course - because reverse engineering is fun)
And, uh, yes, I think the same should apply to non-e-sports. The logic is a bit different, of course. But the value of medical breakthroughs drastically overweights the fictional “purity” in my perception of values. I don’t really care if some athlete can do something (doubly so because I don’t have a nationality I can root for; personal achievements are cool but there’s zero benefit for me or society besides the economic value of the competition event), but if some athlete can do twice as much because of some tech (drug or implant), that may be beneficial for me as well. And yes, I’ve seen that standup/meme about dope Olympics - it’s fun but it doesn’t really invalidate my views.
If I am playing a game with other humans and one of those humans doesn't feel like improving or cannot stand being beaten and decides to use technology that is not allowed to win at the expense of others. That's not a game people are going to want to play.
There is room for people that want to experiment with cheating and using technology in game to aid themselves and that's in a completely separate game that encourages that behavior.
If they genuinely want to become better, they need to apply concepts that allow them to improve which is training what you're not good at and accepting you won't always or ever be the best. Not using an aid that goes against the rules of the game and gives them an unfair advantage.
It's a similar principle I would apply from the world of sport and doping. Just because it might be partially a social problem, the solution isn't just to let it happen.
I’m not advocating for unfairness by just letting people use automation to trample upon those who don’t. Like I’ve said, a machine will always win an unaided human in some tasks - so there is no competition here. Rather, I propose to accept automation and start giving it to everyone, so games will be fair for everyone. If some mechanic relies on imperfect mechanical skills - that’s a bad mechanics that never will be fair despite any wishes to make it so.
Technology is the greatest equalizer. Don’t automatically blindly hate people who want to make bots or copilots. That was the whole point.
We want the developers to provide the constraints so that there is a fair playground, they do this via the game mechanics and preventing outside automation. We just want to play games using the mechanics provided to us, we don't want to focus on building automation to outsmart the competition, we want to outsmart the competition by being a better player when everything is considered equal.
I am automatically against people who make bots or copilots in games that explicitly say you can't use them, in games where the players don't want them and don't want to up against them. That is the whole point.
These anti-cheat solutions are combatting people making or using copilots in games where people don't want them and where the rules say you can't use them. That is the whole point.
I'm hearing that cheating is a social issue and we're dumb for using technology to address it. But the social need to compete, here's a whole masturbatory fantasy of how coding is the last battlefield we'll ever need for that. The cunning and slandered cheaters have shown us a better way.
Let's rewrite the whole activity of gaming so that people who are bad at aiming guns but do know how to install a script can get a trophy.
I believe that games that are purely competition of reflexes are inherently unfair. Bots are merely exposing this unfairness because they can reliably beat all kind of animals, but it exists in humans as well.
But here’s the thing - I don’t understand cheating in this kind of games (besides people being willingly toxic). It’s no fun at all, you just win and that’s it. There is zero competition. So, yea, you’re right it doesn’t make sense to give bot copilots in such games. Their time will come to an end when humans will learn to enhance their reflexes, until they they’ll be probably the last kind of games to keep the “no bots” flame alive.
Please notice a difference between toxic people who want to trump everyone, and normal people who want to improve their lives by using technology because they have skills for that (money is a tricky thing - I need to think about it more). Today they’re all pushed into the same ostracized group, called “cheaters”.
> Let’s rewrite the whole activity of gaming
Yes - why not rewrite? Humanity had rewritten various principles quite a number of times, and continues to do so. The time for games will come soon (not exactly yet, but it’s rapidly approaching and we can see the first signs).
A bot is just a machine (we don’t have GAI and it’s still an unanswered question if we will anytime soon). If the game is truly complex in a good way (LoL surely is not too bad in this regard) - it won’t auto-win it for a human, it will merely remove the routine and grind, exposing the true mechanics, exposing the ultimate meta.
Reputable, in the sense that you're already willing to install and execute a closed-source binary blob (the game itself) on your PC.
1. does not do clientside prediction, instead relies on full server-roundtrip for visual confirmation of your own actions (and therefore cannot "wallhack"/maphack enemy positions)
2. where machine-assisted actions cannot provide mechanical advantage beyond what is already regularly achievable by a normal human (at most only providing improvement in executional repeatability/consistency)
3. where execution depends predominantly on seat-of-the-pants split-second decision-making from high-level experience, as opposed to unambiguously "correct" responses that can be short-circuted without player intervention?
(League runs with a 30Hz tickrate, all actions and movements are first-order continuous, and visible state is fully serverside-obfuscated)
If anything, my point 1 was even further reinforced by what is shown by your video.
Would you mind pointing out which of them is in any way countered by any instant in this video?
The video linked showed various informational overlays based on events that the player client was permitted to observe, such as enemy players using their utilities while in visible range or farming neutral monsters (event of which is always globally broadcast since the jungle timer rework a few years ago).
It overlays a timer on the minimap for when neutral monsters will respawn, timers for when enemy utilities are predicted to complete their cooldown (only if they were used while in the client's visible range), the last-seen position of enemies if they disappeared into the fog of war, the trajectories of prospective enemy attacks & your own range which any slightly proficient players would be well-acquainted with.
The blog described insufficiency of the prior detection method, and statistics of the rate of cheating. It did not address the point that the game, by inherited design (of the genre), already places a ceiling on the effectiveness of automated actions.
What's particularly irksome about the blog, besides the gratuitous language throughout, are expedient omissions of context in statements such as:
> When piloted optimally, scripter win rates hover around 80% in Ranked games
without contextualizing what elo it's measured at or how it compares to a smurf which you'd also expect to have an anomalous winrate before reaching their equilibrium elo. This is then immediately followed by the discussion of the cheating statistics for above-Masters tier, misleading the uncareful reader to draw the conclusion that cheaters can manage 80% winrate in Masters+.
One might be inclined to dismiss this as carelessness in writing, however these kinds of patterns are common throughout Riot's various "technical blogs", especially those posts on valorant's initial release that claimed some earthshattering netcode innovation, then described various bog-standard multiplayer practices without further elaboration, implicitly passing them off as their own invention without actually claiming so.
I'd suggest others here to also spot these patterns for themselves by taking a read at some of these other riot blogposts masquerading as technical deep dives that really are self-promotion aimed to beguile "gamers".
RIOT said 0.03% of players eeported and issue, the majority of which are probably the incredibly common case of Vanguard requiring TMP 2.0 on Windows 11, which doesn’t brick ones PC
Im sympathetic to the security issues, but the outright blue-screening in this article are probably not issues.
1. There's definitely an ongoing, coordinated disinformation effort from cheaters. Some media and real users with poor information hygiene are magnifying it, which is of course the cheaters' goal.
2. Riot's activity metrics are normal, meaning there's no statistically detectable technical issue keeping players out of the game. The actual players are going about their business as usual.
1. See e.g. https://twitter.com/itsgamerdoc/status/1786113515670962505
The one well-known person mentioned in the article matches Riot's explanation at https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1civ4l7/up..., where the issues are self-inflicted by people trying to modify their systems to meet Vanguard's requirements. Vanguard itself isn't the problem.
> About ~0.7% of the playerbase bypassed Microsoft’s enforcement for TPM 2.0 when they installed Windows 11, but the rollout of Vanguard requires that those players now enable it to play the game. This requires a change to a BIOS setting, which differs based on the manufacturer. Vanguard does not and cannot make changes to the BIOS itself.
BIOS settings can be confusing, and we’ve seen two niche cases where it’s created an issue.
The first is that many manufacturers prompt a switch to UEFI mode when TPM 2.0 is enabled, but if the existing Windows 11 installation is on an MBR partition, it would become unbootable afterwards. Some OEMs support LegacyBoot mode with TPM 2.0, but to support UEFI mode, Windows 11 must be installed on a GPT partition. Microsoft has a tool that can help avoid a reformat and reinstall if you’re in this scenario.
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. Older rigs can have compatibility issues with this setting, and that’s actually one of the primary reasons the Vanguard launch was delayed.
For example, some GPUs are known to have Option ROM that is not UEFI SecureBoot capable (especially older cards), and sometimes this can result from players having flashed it themselves to “unlock” the card. If the Option ROM isn’t signed, enabling SecureBoot would prevent your GPU from rendering anything (since it won’t boot), resulting in a black screen. There would be two ways to fix this: Connect the monitor to an integrated graphics card (if you have one) and then disable SecureBoot in BIOS. Remove your CMOS battery to reset back to default settings.
Vanguard's kernel code never even runs in these scenarios.
in the grand schema, you'll lose few % of playerbase, in exchange you'll get much more happy customers, so in the end it will be a win.
The problem is that LoL didn't have this software before and now they do, so for players who may not have experienced problems they might be now.
eSports has grown enormously around the world, with sponsorship and real money on the table. Unfortunately, that has pushed cheating to a whole new level where people will develop and run very sophisticated cheat software. Anti-cheat software therefore needs to see where the anti-cheat software runs and lives, which unfortunately means that anti-cheat software is now running to run at very low levels in the system and has the ability to play havoc if there are bugs.
I genuinely believe that developers aren't developing this software to be nefarious but to provide the best experience for players. Anti-cheat software has been around for a long time and its not the first time its blocked other applications from running.
There was a motto through the LoL cheating community of "Spacebar to Win", where spacebar was the keybind for unloading all your abilities and trying to kill the opponent. A player with good game knowledge and game sense would be easily able to climb to Challenger (the highest rank bracket).
There was a bot that played as a support champion and with a basic decision tree it reached Silver 2. Someone wrote a neural net algorithm for it instead and it reached Gold 4.
The anticheat is an addon such that it can be frequently updated without having to update the core of the game as cheat strategies change.
Cheats being used today outside of the 'breaking human limits' type cheats, are the ones that give players slight advantages that you wouldn't obviously notice. These types of cheats have signatures in how they work and anticheat detects these signatures that occur both through gameplay, but also the signatures it leaves on your system itself.
The detection of human limits and breaking laws of physics cheats are the cheats of yesterday
Anti cheat should just go away completely. High stakes tournaments never held over the network. Always have a physical presence. The likelihood of a cheater being able to cheat in LAN play is very very low. You have it streamed live and referees looking over your shoulder at all times. PCs often not owned by teams.
For online play, rely on community reports and moderation.
It's a total mess. Even with a handful of players actively playing, I almost always find a cheater. I get that anticheats are not "convenient" but to say that we should get rid of them, it's a bit naive.
It’s very frustrating, because I don’t like the idea of rootkit-like anticheat either, but if reports and moderation were the only way to keep cheating at bay, the companies building the games in question would need to keep a team employed full-time to exclusively investigate reports and dole out bans. Even then, this team probably wouldn’t be able to move quickly enough to deal with them all in a timely manner, leaving the problem still somewhat unfixed.
Perhaps the only real solution is for competitive games go current-gen-console-only, where end to end control is a given and invasive anticheat is kept separate from our computers.
It worked back then, anyway.
One of the more unappealing argument types to me, as I age, is of this form.
It's good to induce friction to prevent bad actors even if the friction doesn't prevent everyone.
When most of the matches are played online you need some hope of practicing the game on a relatively level playing field.
This works fairly well for paid games with moderate ($40+) barrier to entry for new accounts. It does close to nothing for popular free games with little to no barrier of entry. Even with the current moderate barrier or entry, people currently buy ($10-ish) leveled accounts to go cheat in ranked with.
Simulate the game world, I know expensive, scale it down and simulate it.
Gun can fire six rounds and has a 2 second reload? How did thay guy fire 30 rounds in the last 4 seconds?
How did that guy travel 2000 meters while floating 100 feet in the air, level over the terrain?
No gpu, could do it with data models and statistics. Simple stuff.
Honestly you don't even need your own servers, have clients report impossible behavior they observe.
High level cheating involves minimally noticeable aimbots or wallhacks of some kind (for a MOBA this would be fog removal). Being able to see enemy cooldowns, scripting combos.
What you're describing would do nothing for the vast majority of online cheating.
Most game devs seem to agree with you. It's not like my idea is revolutionary, but you can go far beyond the physics/rules in most multiplayer games I've played.