League of Legends Switches to Vanguard Anti-Cheat, Potentially Breaking PCs

League of Legends has released Riot Games’ anti-cheat system, Vanguard with the 14.9 patch, with disastrous results for some players.

For those out of the loop, Vanguard is Riot Games’ anti-cheat system that has been primarily used in popular hero shooter Valorant. It works by running in the background to prevent unauthorized software such as cheats or scripts from launching in the game.

Unfortunately, Vanguard is also known to be more aggressive than most anti-cheat softwares and will remain active even if the game is not running, on top of requiring players to manually disable Microsoft’s security features grant the program access to kernel programs that house essential functions for a computer.

League of Legend‘s iteration of Vanguard has not gone any better, as players have started reporting that Vanguard was wrecking havoc on their computers.

The cause of these errors have been mostly attributed to Vanguard falsely flagging system32 files and system software as third party software, thus locking players out of League of Legends until they remove it somehow, even at the risk of destroying their computers.

Naturally, players are not happy and have raised concerns about the possible security issues that the software might pose, despite Riot’s claims that Vanguard does not pose any risk to computers.

Neither Riot Games nor League of Legends has not made any official statement regarding this issue.

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