League of Legends’ anti-cheat won't brick your PC, Riot insist, after adding Valorant’s controversial system to the MOBA

rockpapershotgun.com:

The already controversial decision to add the anti-cheat tool used in shooter Valorant to League of Legends has seemingly caused developers Riot Games even more of a headache. The studio have issued a lengthy assurance that - at least as far as they know - the new anti-cheat software isn’t causing players’ hardware to end up bricked, despite various reports of major issues after its introduction.

Vanguard was added to League of Legends in patch 14.9, bringing the kernel-level anti-cheat system already used in Valorant for a number of years over to the MOBA. The idea was to crack down on bots, scripters and other cheating methods in the wake of Riot’s own data that as many as one in 15 LoL games suffers cheating of some kind. That’s a good intention in concept, but one that has predictably divided opinions over the methods employed, with Vanguard accused of demanding a high CPU cost, effectively operating as spyware and taking screenshots of players' computer displays.

Since the update’s drop on May 1st, those existing complaints have actually been overshadowed by a separate issue: reports that Vanguard was variously causing players’ PCs to crash, then fail to boot, and even that the software was altering their internal system files (with one claim that a user was prompted to delete crucial Windows file system32).

All of this led Riot’s team to take to the League of Legends subreddit to defend the addition of the anti-cheat system and claim that any reported problems were in the vast minority of cases - and that worries of PCs ending up completely bricked were entirely unfounded.

According to the post, “the rollout has gone well and we’re already seeing Vanguard functioning as intended”, with a notable drop in the number of bot accounts in League. In comparison, Riot claimed that less than 0.03% of players had reported problems, with the “vast majority” of those that had run into issues experiencing “easily solved” errors.

“There are also a few trickier situations