Who knew Vanguard would be such an effective marketing campaign for Dota 2

I didn’t think anything would actually be able to make me stop playing league, but riot did it. Never will as long as vanguard exists

Riot is now (and has been for a good amount of time) doing anything BUT improving the game. Fuck that company, they basically got lucky with the game and ran it to the ground. This case of lost potential should be investigated.

It's so hard to explain to non-technical people how Kernel is at the "lowest levels" and that means it has the "highest level of access".

Legit stopped me from playing league because I'm not having that shit on my computer. Played it since season 2, now switched to other games and hobbies.

Monte doing the factor ad meanwhile Richard and Thorin trying not to burst laughing lol

My problem with vanguard is getting kernel privilege is no longer a matter of OS security, you just need a vanguard vulnerability and boom, Mirai but 100x larger. Track record doesn't favor Riot either: it's been breached multiple times through different vectors and solving the DDoS problem at KR servers took them a whole lot of time, even disrupting LCK live matches. Their client is spaghetti, their netsec is laughable, am I supposed to trust installing Vanguard doesnt make my computer more vulnerable?

Riot saying, "Vanguard has not bricked any computers" while blaming LS for not having his BIOs settings perfectly setup is a peak Riot moment. Of course programs have the ability to check these settings but Riot just can't help but victim blame and refuse to admit their constant mistakes. What a joke of a company, honestly I'm glad cause if they were even half decent people I would still be addicted to that shithole.

The issue a lot of people, myself included, were having is that many newer desktops and laptops sold with Win11 pre-installed did not have TPM 2.0 enabled. This isn't actually supposed to be possible as Win 11 requires TPM to be installed, as those upgrading from Win10 will tell you. So you could easily install Vangaurd, as you already have Windows 11, and then have your entire computer labeled as a cheater for not having TPM 2.0 installed. Truly incredible that Riot missed this.

I have played League of Legends since I was a kid in middle school, around the beginning of season 2. I am now married with 3 children. I've played this game a ton over the last 13 years and spent some money on skins etc, but I will now be uninstalling LOL forever. Congratulations Riot, you have managed to make even your most committed players walk away. I've known for years the company was trash but still enjoyed the game in spite of it, but this is the end of the line. I'll just enjoy the eSports side through LFN content and call it good

Just chiming in with a comment that won't be removed by moderators. :) I didn't install vanguard, but a lot of my friends did. All of them but one experienced at least one-two notable problems with their installs, and one of them DID have his windows installation bricked. Something substantial was damaged about the boot partition, or the drive itself, to the point where even when he brought it into a computer shop, they weren't able to recover the data. I'm sure it didn't actually 'wipe out his drive' in entirety, but it did enough damage that clearly the basic techniques you might find someone using at a local shop to do data recovery no longer worked. And as they mention in the video, he did lose access to important files he used for his work from home job, which has probably caused him quite the struggle over the last few weeks (the nature of his job is that everyone manages a bunch of files that aren't in a repository like in software). So yeah, Vanguard's shoddy implementation has definitely caused outright damages that I believe they should be liable for.

the people willing to give up their computer security for *maybe* fewer cheaters are the same people who said the patriot act wasnt that bad as long as you werent doing anything wrong

Well there are some important things to note 1 - Former WoW dev and offensive cybersecurity specialist for 20+ years (Thor aka PirateSoftware) debunked the whole "Kernel Level Anti-cheat" situation which for a lack of a better word is stil useles. Main point is that in videogames it is far far more efficient to make detection methods based on in game actions rather than having a glorified "file detect bot" running on your PC. For the same reason as to why Riot is bad at detecting greefers/trolls etc its the same with the Anti-cheat situation now aka Riot devs arent compitent enough to make such a simple tool that people 15+ years ago made every 3 months 2 - Just like regular anti-cheats once there is a way to bypass something there is no turning back , just because they theoreticly made it "harder" doesnt mean shit cause just like before the same cycle repeats itself , cheaters find ways to cheat > Riots patches anticheat > cheaters find new ways > repeat . The fact that cheating will initially drop to near 0 also doesnt mean anything cause cheaters are always on the market so as i said its a matter of time until cheats come out and those who cheat will get the new ones. IP and Hardware bans were possible before Vanguard so again its not like they need it to be Kernel Level to get that info and even before for some ungodly stupid reason they almost never did Hardware bans aside from botting situations in South East Asia. Also because Riot is incompitent as fuck when they released their article on cheating on their website they showed graphs that perfectly show the time of Banwaves throughout the years which gives the cheaters a massive advantage cause 1 they can plan accordingly and 2 due to the time intervals between banwaves its very predictable when they would happen if they were to be changed since there isnt really room for much diffrence in intervals so even if they changed when they do banwaves cheaters would very easily find out when. 3 - Although there hasnt been any information on this i personally believe Vanguard was created initially and was purposed for League of Legends since its the biggest market there is , assuming Valorant was in development for 2-3 years its very possible they used Vanguard as a marketing strategy for Valorant initially (Even in Valorant they have a cheating problem) but the main purpose was to use Valorant as a "beta test" to test the waters for Vanguard and how players would react and also to see its effect on a game that unlike league is way harder to detect cheaters by in-game methods , my assumption is that since they saw little to no pushback to Vanguard in Valorant they went forward with adding it into League that has a larger players base (or subject base on this matter) although again this is only my speculation am just giving out the info that this gels together too well with how they did things. (Also it is known that they didnt go all out on Valorant so its not hard to believe that they used it as a Gunea pig for the bigger project of Vanguard because at the end of the day Vanguard isnt a big deal to Riot but it is for Tencent)

Developing a kernel runtime that requires a very specific TPM/BIOS config combo is just negligent at best. People barely know how to turn on their computers, don't expect the end user to be able to do anything beyond that.

52:00 my personal experience with having the wrong settings (at least in valo) is it'll just kick you off the game and tell you to check your bios settings. I feel like there's probably something more fishy underneath the hood of why it's bricking PCs.

Riot's Vanguard system will be used to hack people in the future, that level of access just needs one mistake in their code to allow someone full access to the PC and no IT company in the world has not had someone break their program at some point. The easiest example Genshin impact's anticheat has been used for ransomware and has had multiple exploits (latest CVE 2024 22830). I just hope that when Vanguard gets hacked that it's actually reported by gaming news, but Riot is just as likely to do a quiet patch and sweep it under the rug.

Thank you guys, I think this is a losing battle but I admire the transparency as always.

Bricked my PC completely. Had to CMOS reset etc etc

I am having a horrible experience with Vanguard. Over this weekend i kept getting an error message saying "that vanguard has stopped working" and as a result i get booted from ranked games. This resulted in me being penalised for "bad behaivour" ie "quitting" matches. Right now i am in potential of having my account frozen. I have sent bug reports and nothing is being done. What do I do!!!!!!!

Thorin was pretty chill today, he is such a good podcast host when he controlls his energy and doesn't channel it into talking all the time.

@1:35:20 yes you can close vanguard as Monte mentions, but there is a very high chance at least for me on Windows 10 that Windows will update itself every single time you close Vanguard

There is a popular streamer called BatemanL9 he is the Joker of League Streamers (guy who runs it down 24/7). He just switched to MacOS for his setup, because there is no Vanguard for Mac.

I quit league when they first announced they were going to implement Vanguard back in January, I've been meaning to try out Dota but still haven't x)

Great talk, good guest.

I quit league almost three years ago , along with booze as two most addicting and life wrecking substances for me. It still sits on my drive tho, biding its time, waiting for a slip up. Thanks for the last push to finally get rid of it fully, and thanks for the code for raycons a while back, they are nice 😊

Just had my BIO's restarting yesterday... I didn't know why, now I do x)

I don't use reddit (nor do I play League of Legends anymore), but I really enjoyed this video. It's a relief to see people say things that I've been realizing/mentioning to friends for years now. I felt crazy for a while (the bot astroturfing downplaying every single suspicion I had was effective for a few months). Eventually I realized that the comment section is full of bots arguing with bots across the board on that website, so I left. I visit other forums occasionally. They have their own issues, but it's refreshing seeing actual people with their own (non bot influenced) opinions express them without tiptoeing around everything to avoid the wrath of the "um actually" brigade. I swear, sometimes they just comment paragraph after paragraph of meaningless salad in order to confuse people, lol.

to monte's point around 53 min i had no idea about this vanguard kernal level stuff

At 14:18 Yasukeh talks about "Problem reaction Solution", Riot is notorious for doing this. They did it with Eve when they gutted her kit because the way stealth working in early league. They were even banning people for playing her rather than just removing the character. They did it with Old Aatrox (even though at the end of his lifespan he was an incredibly healthy character). Riot has had tons of practice doing this and they need to be called out on their bullshit.

Amazing episode. I especially liked how Yasukeh mentioned that the player base have gotten lesser after the vanguard implementation. I myself stopped playing at the same time so it's nice to see that many players don't accept this.

wasn't there official riot stats that the vast majority of cheaters were hardstuck gold to plat? turns out that micro-managing a champion is literally only 1/10th of what makes you good at the game, it's like Yasukeh said you can have the perfect kogmaw kiting you want if I'm like master yi or zed I'm running you down anyway

Rocket League has competitive ready accounts available for free from Epic Games directly (if you play in a party). I wish so badly they would make it harder to play comp on a new account, but Epic Games just wants to show their metrics of unique accounts. It's crazy, every high-ranked player I've met has 5+ "alt" accounts, and most players in general over like bottom 25% I've met have 2-3. And now finally, hacks are becoming common in the game on top of the smurfs for the same reason. Bans mean absolutely nothing when accounts are free in terms of money and effort.

I don’t think I did anything extra to download vanguard. I didn’t except anything or even press a download for the patch I believe the client did it on its own. 53:02

53:00 THATs why unistall this game right now. How the fuck are they alowd to without any warning install this shit on my PC ???

Didn't think I would uninstall league of legends since its kind of the only game I enjoy with my friends. What Richard said starting from 30:00 changed that.

Dropping this video on the day of the midseason patch...

Would it make sense to just uninstall after every session

vanguard reduces the performance of my 2022 gaming laptop to the state of my 2010 budget gaming pc thanks riot.

I understand people's concerns. I have 2 pc's and had no problem with vanguard yet and one of them is an old laptop bought in 2016 where is running windows 10. I saw a tweet from a known cheater saing that he is using a macbook now because there are no plans that riot will make mac users install vanguard and i find that absurd.

Dang, after 10 plus years of playing DoTA 2 I was considering playing Valorant & LoL but when the installer wanted to install this anti cheat, I started doing research & found this podcast. Thanks for the info yall, don’t think I’ll be installing this.

Fantastic video fellas

Now getting out of League is a thing I can do after playing it since Season 1

OMG didn't see you guys, since time immemorial, when Lewis was TheOneWhomShantbeNamed

Man i love this show.

Fantastic episode guys. Yasukeh was a great guest too. Actually didn't know how much data it is actually tracking, which was interesting to find out.

Thanks for the reporting. This shit looked weird but I use it for the homies a few times a month. Not worth the risk. We’ll find something else

I mean thing is i had every single skin in the game up until patch 14.9. Even sunk-cost fallacy cannot justfiy me installing vanguard.

Does uninstalling riot client get rid of vanguard too or do I need to take specific measures?

The TPM 2.0 thing is only related to Windows 11 because it's required to run the OS. It's completely redundant and useless info that Riot has given us and it has only partially been addresed here.

another great podcast with Voldemort

This one will be a banger, though I would have preferred if someone with more development/anti-cheat experience was the 4th horseman.

2:14 Riot vanguard anti-cheat 2:28

Fok Vanguard! Fok Rito! Can't play TFT anymore because of some wanking bloat/spyware. Do I want to give access to my computer to company who cant properly manage their own game or esports? No! Futhermore, If i play their game, I have consent to terms of service. But when they're bloatware get's access to my computer, there is no terms of service for them? So if they fok up and I suffer damages, it will be my fault not theirs. I say it again, fok RIOT!

Yasukeh going hard 👍

18 blue screen's before a mysterious critical update for vanguard. All different error codes.

Did Richard release that riot lyte article?

54:36 great point by richard: how the hell do you not AB test this?? basically everything done by big companies is AB tested, to avoid exactly these types of issues. delegating a small team to help a few dozen people out of 10k is waaaaaay more feasible than trying to solve problems for tens of thousands of people. AB testing = rolling out a (possible breaking) feature to smaller (in preference, distributed) populations and gradually increasing the number of people using it

I noticed comments about Vanguard getting removed from League videos. That was already suspicious. Especially considering most of them were neutral informative comments.

What Richard talked about in the beginning how his email got hacked after sending a report ticket to riot... Something similar happened to me some years ago too. You know how it has the "login and watch a LCS match on our website and get a free chest/loot/whatever)" So one time I did. You have to login to Leagues official website to get that reward. And after that I got a suspicious notification that someone had logged in to my email acc. And it also used to be that you only could send report tickets on their official website instead of directly in the client(many years ago). But anyway don't ever log into their website, it's not secure for shit! But also it just shows that you can't trust Riot with any sensitive information.

Calling it now: Riot is using Vanguard to pivot into the data industry, like Google.

Why don’t they just get someone who actually specializes in it to talk about this stuff

"The Grognak down here goes..." You can tell Fallout is taking over Richard's life these days lol.

The moment Riot Games or Tencent prioritized eliminating cheaters over user's privacy concerns or ease to play without technical issues is the moment they've lost their reputation as a company who prioritizes the quality of their products over the benefits they might take from them. Or, to put in other words: Do players really care more about cheaters than about their personal privacy or ease to play? I really doubt it, since I am one who doesn't. Heck, the only type of people who might actually care a considerable amount of deal about this are high elo players, and I don't know the exact numbers, but how much are them, like Yassuke, 1% of the playerbase???

I recently had a bricked PC, how could I possibly know that Vanguard caused it? Why would I think to report it to RIOT GAMES, IF MY PC WAS WRECKED!

I feel like even if the number of players drastically decreases from people refusing to install Vanguard, Riot (in their usual Riot way) would respond to it by saying "look at all the cheaters we've removed from the game! There were even more than we initially thought! Vanguard's addition to League has been a rousing success." 🙄

55:15 they did roll it out in the Philippines server first though

Flusha cheated in 2014

I have been playing league for 8 years and Vanguard made me quit. Impressive.

It's about control. You will own nothing and you will be happy. And yeah, I used to play LoL non stop from like 2012 to 2020. Since then, I've gotten on a hand full of times to play a few games. I will not be getting on anymore period.

no lies detected.

gamersdoc is basically finalboy but for anticheat instead of gaming mice

Thank fkn God for Yasukeh! Finally i know what a brick is!

hi, im a casual league player (maybe 3-5 ranked games per month) and didnt really pay attention to the whole vanguard situation but somehow the yt algorithm suggested a clip from this show and after watching you talk about this i uninstalled both the league client and vanguard

I mean I think the simple truth is most people probably won’t care. Tons of people’s favorite games unfortunately have kernel level anti cheat.

I think to some extent what was missed when discussing kernel anticheat is that if you can't know that the kernel isn't modified, you can't trust that anything you ask the computer to do for you in userspace isn't lying to you. That's the problem with user-level anticheat. You can't actually trust anything that you're told about the state of the system. that's also why it has to be loaded at boot. I uninstalled league rather than running vanguard, but there are real technical reasons for how it runs.

Monte at 1:31:55 says Riot brought up screenshots when no one asked. Except people did ask. That post went out the day after that Tweet was going around claiming they looked at the code and that it took screenshots of your pc and things like Discord etc. So yes. people did in fact ask. So I ask you, why didn't you do any research?

Good guy Riot: knows i relapse into league once a year before remembering after a month how shit a time I have *introduces a kernel level anti cheat i wouldnt touch with a 6ft bargepole* well that's freed up a month of every year! thanks Riot

ESL Wire was a kernel anti cheat and everybody knows that nobody ever cheated in ESL random leagues... ;P

I quit playing league when Vanguard dropped. I wasn't enjoying it already, even winning in that game is not fun. And Vanguard was just another reason for me to quit. I will still follow esport of it, i really enjoy that, but playing that game? No more. I will much rather do something that is actually fun and does not make me want to scream and punch my monitor even after winning.

Soo happy I stopped playing league years ago, I only play the mobile game wild rift

Personally I don't really care about privacy/CCP argument, however having permanently-running app that just slows down your computer just to play TFT or few ARAM games a month makes very little sense to me, and Riot isn't known for their technical excellency either, their client has been a memory-leaking mess since its inception so I'm not at all surprised about blue screens and driver issues that the Vanguard has been causing. Also, logically, if every online game made such anticheat, would that mean you need to run like 10 of them at the same time, with them clashing with each other, this is subscription service dilemma all over again, there's no way that's good for anyone moving forward.

watching on my phone through a vpn on neighbours wifi. Stay safe

Unfortunately now that Vanguard has been implemented, it will never be removed. If only because Riot doesn't want to lose face.

IDC about the privacy concerns, all companies are selling my data anyways, but I for sure do not trust a company that after 15 years of trying cannot get a decent game client to not F something up on my pc with software like this. Uninstalled.

33:40 TOP TIER THORIN QUOTE

Interesting topic. But i dunno if i care so much about the drama around it. I would much rather have someone on who worked on anti-cheat software talk about why or why not this level of anti-cheat is needed. I have once in my whole life experienced cheating as a diamond player, so for me it just seemed like overkill to make it so intrusive. To be fair, i never want to experience the amount of cheaters CS2 have had recently.

im getting daily blue screens after vanguard, prob fucked me nvidia settings

Man i really liked LoL but they shot it in the head right in front of me like a rabbit they made me raise was a pretty rough psyop if u think about it.

"Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten"- this quote, summs up perfectly, whole riot vanguard situation.

Btw there is a video from a user called: “minigod” who is credible, highly skilled aim trainer player and he has a video where he gets banned from VALORANT due to his incredible aim being mistaken for cheating. AND, he’s not the only credible aim trainer who has been banned this way before. So the notion there are never false positives is easily provably false

44:00 i'm one of those people who stopped playing/ uninstalled LoL earlier this year ahead of Vanguard, even after playing for 10+ years, and enjoying the game with my friends. I refuse to grant a video game company like Riot that level of access to my life though. I'm currently on the DoTA grind and i am sad there is no jungle😭

I was a long time player of League. Played since beta. I uninstalled Riot stuff on ALL my devices because of Vanguard.

Its not necessary for LoL. But Valorant uses it. If they want to "steal" data, they could already be doing it from Valorant players.

1:03:40 sounds like something riot would do...so there's a 0.0000003% chance to break someones PC...how many people cheat, 0.0000003%? brilliant, roll it out

Was cheating actually a problem in league in the first place though?

It goes without saying, but this isn't some phobia about China or the Chinese. If Riot were in bed with the US government I'd be just as fucking repelled by their anticheat. There is no government who I want to have kernel level access to my PC, nor Riot themselves. And that's just a surface level take. This is a company that has been breached on more than one occasion and we're to trust them to keep their kernel level access to themselves? A company that historically treats and pays its employees poorly? The vectors available to compromise this system boggle the mind.

Is monte confirming that the reason why le blanc was nerfed 6 months ago is because the chinese government is trying to prevent me from climbing once again ?

My friend group had uninstalled League cuz of having BLUESCREENS AND FAILS

man I had no choice but to uninstall league, I cannot risk bricking my pc. It's actually so sad

All I wanted was to play a neat game with friends when I was a kid, not deal with such a ridiculous cult.