Riot Games to add their kernel level anti-cheat "Vanguard" to League of Legends

People talk about playing LoL the same way they talk about meth

Everyone sane quit loooooong ago
- 👀
I have fond memories of meth, though.
As they should. That said, other than some presumably rare scripters Riot really did make an incredibly well balanced (don't @ me salt lords) and easy player experience free of any obvious cheaters.

I wasted far too much of life on that game, and let it frustrate me way too much, but that doesn't mean I won't still log in every season and crush some noobs (and get crushed right back) until I hit Gold and can go back to ignoring it for another year, and I've never been able to say that about another game for ten years in a row.

But this...

This might finally set me free.
- Dota still works on Linux and is a far superior game. Fight me :-)

Thank you riot for pusbing an update that cuts off all non windows players. I can finally quit, now I am free to roam this earth.

roam this earth.

Gonna jungle for a while, eh?
You deserve the pain.

This is a win for the Linux gaming community.

How? Fewer games means fewer people interested in Linux for gaming. Everyone has their one game, and I imagine that's LoL for a lot of people.

I don't like it, but I really prefer that it work than not.
- Counterpoint: it's League of Legends
  
  /s just to be safe
- It was a meme because it's LoL. I wasn't serious.
- It's a win because the core mechanics of LoL (and MOBA's in general) cause toxic interactions

I've always wondered what LoL is like and if it's any fun. Now I'll never find out.

Its fun but the people who play it are the most irrational, angey and fucking miserable people you will encounter.
- That’s why I play single player so I only deal with one irrational, angry and fucking miserable person.
- I always found dota to be worse from my casual experience.
"I wonder how crack tastes."
It's an amazing game, but really hard to get into as a new player. And playing with friends of wildly different skill levels tends to ruin the experience.

If you play with experienced friends, you'll quickly learn that the best way to win is to do nothing and effectively stay out of the way. You learn to minimize your negative effect on the game, which just isn't a fun way to play.

If you play solo, you have to get beat down at least the first ten games until you get to a level with other new players and small children. Then you can spend the next 20 games learning until you can apply enough that the game starts to be fun.
LoL is the poster child for toxic community. The game is fantastic but it's really not worth playing because the other people ruin the fun.

It really only takes one person to ruin a match and you're always playing with 9 other people (in the "main" game mode). Because of the way ranking work, leaving early because of a troll actually punishes you so you are incentivized to stay in a game that you're not enjoying. It makes people cranky and they tend to take it out on internet strangers.

And for some reason, only in LoL do they seem to feel free to use the most despicable language you can imagine.

Anyways, there are other games in the same genre if you want to try them. DOTA2 is the obvious one, though I personally think it's a worse game than LoL. The Blizzard one was really good but it was shut down IIRC.
- Fairly sure Heroes of the Storm is still playable, just not getting a ton of active development.
- That's dumb. There should be an option to vote to end the game early, and if you get a majority with at least one on each team, the match ends.
You’re not missing out on anything. One of the worst games I’ve ever played.
- That's my opinion too, but it's a fantastic game for the right person.
  
  It has a good mix of strategy and tactics, which is exactly what a competitive game should have. If you're looking for a competitive game that doesn't really benefit from twitch reflexes, it's hard to beat. I recommend people try it or something similar (e.g. Dota 2) at least once. It's not for me, but I don't regret few hours I spent with it.

Friendly reminder that dota 2 has amazing native linux support and valve is recently taking direct actions against cheaters and smurfs without resorting to intrusive anti-cheats cccc:

I have a steam deck and have not played this game. Do you recommend it?
- I wouldn't recommend on steam deck. On a desktop/laptop yes.
- steam deck is plenty powerful enough, but yeah playing with a controller is awful. played some 1v1 with a friend right after steam controllers came out, I think the only time either of us died was to a tower
- Connect a mouse and keyboard to your steamdeck and you're good. It's not a MOBA for joysticks.
  
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Dota is the way

Posted something on Reddit, posting here as well:

As a Linux user and dual booter, it's a shame to see this happen.

Kernel level anti-cheat always felt like those security measures at airports. Where they've granted themselves invasive and intrusive powers in order to "protect people", but it's just smoke and mirrors designed to avoid giving people the resources required to actually do their job properly.

I trust Riot, but I'm not sure I trust them when they've given themselves permission to constantly watch my webcam, microphone, monitor and all my files. Given that they've specifically gone out of their way to avoid OS safeguards to grant themselves that permission, I'm not sure how much I trust "Trust me bro" and contracts that can be changed arbitrarily and unilaterally.

Anyway, rant over. Since there are Rioters apparently responding to things, figured I'd ask: Is there a requirement for Secure Boot in LoL's implementation? For context, Secure Boot is a system to prevent software not approved by Microsoft from running on computers. I know you can enroll your own certificates, but firstly that seems like a hassle, and secondly that seems to remove the main benefit Riot has for requiring it. Obviously, as a Linux user this would block me from running LoL entirely, even if I dual booted into my Windows 10 install (I got curious and tried it, and apparently my motherboard doesn't even include Microsoft's certificate for some reason. :D).

I have a more technical question as well; I'm not familiar with TPM enough to know this. If you don't use your TPM module for bitlocker encryption on Windows, isn't it trivial to just reset it to get a new identifier thingie? If they're using it to ensure that there is one Riot Account per physical computer, I'm not sure how harder this is to work around than when games were using MAC addresses in the olden days.

I'd continue on and say "you've lost a paying customer whose spent probably hundreds of pounds on this game" and whine about how I've been softbanned from the game because Riot assumes that all Linux users are filthy cheaters, but that's probably not worth it. This almost certainly was done by management looking at the books and thinking this was profitable, rather than a compassionate decision by those passionate about the game and wanting to see it succeed.

Instead, I extend my sympathies to the poor Riot developers and PR people reading this thread and having to deal with the fallout of their management's decisions.

Two decades of tweaking to balance a hundred-odd weird-ass characters, and these geniuses still can't figure out any way to detect cheating besides crawling up your computer's butthole.

Why? Is there a cheating issue in LoL?

If there is a game with PvP multiplayer, there will always be a cheating issue.
- I’m talking “servers riddled with cheaters” kind of issue

Well, I ain't playing LoL anymore then.

Damn i just got into this one. I might switch to dota.

Just get out of mobas altogether before you require anger management courses
- Lol too late I'm on lithium and zoloft 🙃
I wonder what LoL players think when they switch to Dota. In case you get in, let me know.
- Well I'm aram trash so my opinion is probably irrelevant, but at a glance dota seems more technical, requires more game knowledge. But what do i know 🤷‍♀️