League of Legends and Valorant Players Being Forced to Run Closed Source Low-Level Software.
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.
Ignore the fact that we have political, state, and financial interest to do so, and that you would have no way of verifying or detecting if we did harvest your data, but you can trust us.
If you ask me, it's best to treat any program requiring kernel level access that isn't part of your base operating system or something you created and have full control over as malware. All it takes is one exploit or something of similar nature and some bad actors taking advantage of it before it can be patched for your computer to become fucked.
I was gonna care until I read league of legends. Clearly people already hate themselves and despise sensible choices and alternatives. Otherwise they wouldn't play lol.
It really confuses me why people would want to play a competitive video game that is balanced around profit. Riot openly admits to buffing and nerfing based on skin sales and champion releases.
I've been playing League casually from time to time on Linux, and it's just a shame that they're adding Vanguard to the game since that kills any compatibility it had under wine. Though, knowing League community, a lot of players on Linux are so addicted to the game, they'll switch their operating systems for it or buy a second computer just to play.
This really saddens me. LoL is a game that will forever connect me to some of my best friends, I played hundreds if not thousands of hours, even through I have not played nearly as much over recent years. We even did go to public viewing of the world's finals.
If they force this on us, then it will mean that my last game of lol was played months ago.
Edward Snowden showed that the US is spying on their citicens but nobody seems to care. But when China is doing it, everybody seems to lose their mind.
Can you run games like this in a virtual machine? Would that eliminate kernel level general invasiveness concerns because it's a...virtual kernel I guess? Does that virtualization require too much overhead to run demanding games?
I think the main issue here (I haven't seen it mentioned in the top comments) is that LoL doesn't even have a cheating problem honestly.
I've been playing since 2014, off and on, and I think I might have met maybe one scripter (I'm not really sure).
Lol has definitely a toxicity problem, but I honestly don't think it has ever had a scripters/cheaters problem, so I really don't understand this. Is it because of bot accounts? Whose games are these bots ruining (never seen them between gold-diamond)? Does it justify a kernel level anti cheat? Honestly, the real problem with this is not the kernel level anti cheat (because I guess that might be useful for games like valorant), it's the fact that this was never really even close to be necessary
You cannot make a paper that can have any text written onto, but not the one text you don't like. The only way to do it is to spy on someone and check actively what is being written.
You cannot make a computer that can run any program written into, but not the one program you don't like. The only way to do it is to spy on someone eather physically or via lower level spyware.
As a geopolitical side note to all this, there is a small but real chance that we may be going to war with (Edit: China) someday in the future, over Taiwan.
Do you really want an adversary that can potentionally disable a large portion of your populations computers in one fell swoop?
Edit: Because of Tencent's ownership of Riot, which is a Chinese company.
No thanks, I'll stick to dota 2 and cs2. Everyone else should do the same, this kernel level anti cheat doesn't even work. Well, no anti cheat is perfect, but vanguard isn't any better than any other anti cheat. All it's doing is collecting data about your computer and running at an insanely invasive level.
By the replies, I almost assumed this was 4-chan. It's either some bold bravado, or generic out of touch shaming people foe allowing kernel level access.
There are interesting conversations to be had around this topic. For example, Riot in the article rises the following points, can we address those?
Cheat software developers are already releasing cheats that operate at this level. If Riot wants to combat them, it has to do so at the kernel level.
Lots of other companies are already using similar software to prevent cheating.
"This isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have." Claiming that if they wanted to steal data, their example being a secret recipe, then they could already do so in user mode.
Wait so the not being able to completely get rid of the Riot client and all their games and it still popped up on my desktop wasn't me going crazy? It might be Chinese malware in the end? This is just a whole new meaning to that now
It's been a shit year for comp games for me. I've been playing csgo since release day and source before that but with cs2 my entire friend group had to shift away because comp no longer works for us (tried yesterday and got 2 matches over 8.5 hours of queue). for a couple of months we just stopped playing cs and because of that basically stopped talking entirely. i'd never played league before and never wanted to, but they were all into it so i thought it was better to do something with them that i didn't like than nothing at all. I spent 3 months learning it and got somewhat up to their level (on one role with like 3 characters only).... and then this. so now we are back to cs2 purgatory queues until valve caves to those morons that think vanguard is good. why even bother putting time into a comp game anymore. rise above, morty, play tetris.
I find it contradictory how Riot's own explanation contains the following two statements:
This isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have.
The problem here arises from the fact that code executing in kernel-mode can hook the very system calls we would rely on to retrieve our data, modifying the results to appear legitimate in a way we might have difficulty detecting.
If the first statement was true (which it's not), then they shouldn't need any additional capabilities offered by running at the kernel level to surveil the system to detect cheats. As they admit in the second statement though, it is exactly because cheats abuse the OS security model to gain capabilities to both monitor and interfere with the game in an invisible manner that they need to get those additional capabilities to invisibly monitor and interfere with other programs too. The best they can do is a pinky promise that they won't abuse this power, but they don't even give us that promise and instead insist they don't actually have that power. That's super suspect to me.
I hope people using cheating software understand the dire security consequences of installing and running that type of software too, especially in that it comes from very shady sources.
The decision to push Vanguard upon League players is a baffling one, especially since hacking, scripting and botting are nowhere near as prominent in MOBA games.
I can only see one potential upside to this and that is Riot being able to more effectively hardware ban serious rule breakers.
My problem with Riot is that their Customer Support is almost Blizzard levels of shit.
Oh, so the company which changed groovy Zilean into a cranked out meth head to please the CCP, because they're legally obligated to serve them, now wants kernel level access to every computer playing the most popular PVP game?
Fuck everything about that. China's openly stated goal is world domination and they control every facet of their citizen's lives, AND STILL HAVE MORE VIDEOGAME CHEATERS THAN ANYWHERE ELSE!
I understand people here are not that big of a fan for kernel level anticheats, but if cheaters are able to easily bypass a non-kernel level anticheat, what other choice do they really have?
Edit January 20th, 2024 7:03 PM (19:03) EST: While all of you have good points, I'm not backing down on this. Yes, I get the privacy concerns but have we thought about the application could possibly only be sending/receiving data for updates to the anticheat, maybe sending data only when the game is open (or the launcher), or something like that? Again, I'm not backing down, I said what I said. I'm fine with all of you disagreeing with what I said, but I won't back down.
Edit2 January 20th, 2024 7:11 PM (19:11) EST: I did not realize until now that Tencent has a stake in Riot Games. I see your concerns now, but I'm still not backing down.