Riot Games has publicly addressed the backlash to its custom in-house anti-cheat program Vanguard, today declaring just 0.03 percent of League of Legends players have actually reported any issues.
Following a huge uproar in the League community in the hours after the kernel-level Vanguard program went live, the developers moved to allay concerns by sharing a lengthy response on the League subreddit on May 2. In the response, Riot suggested most preliminary issues have been related to “common error codes” or driver incompatibilities rather than anything more nefarious.
In particular, the devs firmly stated they had not yet “confirmed any instances of Vanguard bricking anyone’s hardware”—a direct rebuttal to the majority of claims that have swept over social media since yesterday.
Several “confusing” BIOS problems did pop up, Riot also added, but those were mostly related to switching UEFI modes and SecureBoot settings.
“Overall, the rollout has gone well and we’re already seeing Vanguard functioning as intended,” Riot’s anti-cheat manager Matthew “K3o” Paoletti explained to players. “We’ve already seen a hard drop off of bot accounts in the usual places, and we will continue to monitor this.”
Early Vanguard numbers include around 200 games terminated and more than 1,500 offending players automatically banned in the first 24 hours. This is all while the new League anti-cheat program is still rolling out in monitor mode—only the most egregious cheaters have been on the opening-day hit lists.
This opening-day saga around League, Vanguard, and the kernel-level program purportedly “bricking” hardware would all be very familiar to those in the Riot offices; nearly exactly the same complaints were leveled at the heavyweight studio and its anti-cheat program when it was launched in VALORANT. In 2020, Reddit and other social platforms were similarly awash with gamers claiming their PCs had been “ruined.”
At the time, Riot hit back by pointing out that other modern titles also use kernel-mode drivers—Call of Duty, Overwatch, Helldivers, Apex Legends, and more do employ similar programs—and that cheat programs run at kernel level, so Vanguard has to do so too.
League players can expect more updates on the Vanguard rollout soon, with community manager Riot Sakaar promising to keep fans in the loop.
Right now, if you’re having issues, contact Riot support directly.
