League will finally be receiving an update to its Anti-Cheat system.
Cheating and Botting have become a serious matter of concern for League of Legends players. For the last couple of years, cases of cheating have steadily been increasing. Not only that, but in February of last year, Riot was hit by a massive social engineering attack, which led to League of Legends and TFT‘s source code being stolen.
The game’s anti-cheat feature can effectively discourage most of these cheating and botting issues. Unfortunately, the anti-cheat in League of Legends is a little outdated. For more than ten years, since League of Legends’ inception itself, this anti-cheat has been a part of the game.
So, It was high time that Riot implemented a better Anti-Cheat, especially considering that Riot experienced a significant security breach the previous year. Thus, Riot will be overhauling its Anti-Cheat.
In a recent “Season 2024 Look Ahead,” Riot officially announced that they will be switching to a new Anti-Cheat soon.
Read More: Riot Announces Two Upcoming VGU In League of Legends
New Anti-Cheat
In a few weeks, League of Legends and TFT will be switching to Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat Vanguard. It’s a kernel-level Anti-Cheat that Riot has implemented in their other IP, VALORANT.
Riot claims that by implementing Vanguard, they will be able to apprehend cheaters and botters as soon as possible. It will also allow Riot to be able to hardware ban offenders and terminate mathes if a cheater is detected.
Overall, if Vanguard works as well as it does on VALORANT, League will have a lot less cheaters going forward.
Concerns Regarding Privacy
Privacy is a big concern when it comes to using Vanguard. Since Vanguard is a kernel-level software, it will have access to your whole system. This has raised tons of privacy concerns among many players.
Riot responded to the fact, saying, “Vanguard does not collect or process any personal information differently from our current anti-cheat software. We don’t need or want to know anything more about you or your machine other than what is necessary to maintain integrity when playing our games.”
Release Date
As for the implementation of the new Vanguard, it will be coming in either late February or early March.
So we can expect Vanguard to come to League on either Patch 14.4 or 14.5, which will be released on Thursday, February 22, and Wednesday, March 6, respectively.
