Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.
Summary:
The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.
The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.
Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.
That’s fair. But I don’t think the MOBA scene as it is would switch to small communities like that .
Also, for people wanting to cause trouble, bans are meaningless sadly. Unless you also have some rigorous system for sign up. And I guess a small community could have that. But something at scale like a popular game with millions of players can’t.
And rigorous only goes so far, before it’s impinging on privacy.
It’s a tough issue to crack. Popularity and a large scale is always the reason foe all the cheaters and trolls to come around.
Do you know if the network delay is tolerable to play with almost anyone, anywhere in the world for casual and competative MOBA games?
I see no answer to stop trolling but perhaps there is another way worth investigating for cheaters. Some companies treat piracy as people simply wanting the game without paying and would invest in DRM. Some consider it as them providing a worse service than the piracy sites so they should improve the service. Maybe cheaters are unsatified customers?
Would some cheaters be satified with in-game cheats and not look for more extreme 3rd party cheats? Suppose cheaters were provided servers as a choice (in a friendly way instead of shadow banning) which let them play against willing non-cheaters. This supposes regular players could be encouraged to fight with some level of handicap as a challenge.