I uninstalled it along with windows and i'm on Linux now.

I wish it was possible to play TFT without this shit. I left the game when Vanguard came out.

Wanted to get back into LoL but this just not want to install it. Thanks for the info

long time no see OW boi!

The issue is, Vanguard (and similar software) makes enforcing security boundaries on my computer much harder. I used to run those games sandboxed or in VMs.

I was about to install the game after lots of years not playing it but I stopped when I read about Vanguard. I googled a bit and there isn't many info after 2021 that talks about Vanguard. Your video popped out and I checked it. Near the end of it, I though that it cannot be that intrusive. I clicked install. Then I proceeded to read some comments while waiting for installation. Upon completion I immediately deleted without allowing the computer to restart. The comments made me realize that even if I want to play again it is not worth to make my pc (and my life) vulnerable to anything. I will keep playing Brawls Stars to ease this pvp ick I have. Thanks for the informative video tho

I ban League of Legends from watching the content on my PC, who do they think they are?

Stopped playing one month before it was released here in the Philippines. Man I still miss it. Bright side is I was able to be productive throughout the year than I would if I was still playing League but every once in a while I get these re-lapses because I miss playing my Jinx, Urgot and Soraka. So far though I haven't gone back, it's just too much for a single game.

Played since season 2, End for me, i only played league of linux

Tbh, the bigger issue is that kernel extensions are allowed in the first place. Microsoft should do the same like Apple and just kick this feature out of their OS for good.

Gotta love how most games supported by china are all slowly getting some type of invasive anti cheat. Surely nothing shady going on in this cold war we are currently having...in which information is power...

Client decides to just keep closing on me rn. Vanguard might be the best thing to happen to league, so i can quit the game.

been playing since summer 2013, for the most part I've experienced more toxicity than seeing a bot and if i ever saw a bot was once in a blue moon in aram match. Since the toxicity is absurd in this community i would only play special game modes, and shortly after 2018-2019 that became a habit if logging in when urf is out etc. its been a fun ride but it's not worth the problem Vanguard can give to your pc. I'm sure there is more normal players quitting while cheaters have found ways to keep on cheating.

I cant update league of legends It will brick my pc and make it imposible to play a lot of other games Skyrim Dark souls Project zomboi Project reality War Thunder Fox hole Its just not whorted!

ITS NOT SECURITY BOUNDARY. ITS CALL RISK TOLERANCE. Ffs this dude is like 6 months out of service desk or something.

This dude is disingenuous af. Anticheats do NOT need kernel level access to be effective. Having to disable and restart your PC should not have to be done. I wonder what this guy thinks about the traffic vanguard sends when you aren't in game.

Author, You are Tencent shill. Showing Level99 user stupidity of running unknown executable as an excuse for having chinese kernel-mode driver loaded at boot time is just too blatant. With infected executable the damage could be limited to running user rights, with vanguard everything is possible. It is also harder to monitor if vanguard is touching your wallet.dat gpg keyring or scada login creditentials and xi the pooh comics.

if I cannot install vanguard on my perfectly working laptop that was able to play league before the update and now because its "too old" to install vanguard then its a game that I'm not going to play anymore. Likewise with windows 11 gonna install ubuntu on that laptop. Every major companies are just trying to make us buy new stuff when we doesn't need it and it make me sick. Shameless world that we are living in today.

riot take back this crap, come on guys

The vanguard discussion has been really poor from both sides of the isle. I do agree in general that a user may have security boundaries towards the kind of software they use based on the company that owns them and not being comfortable with working with, but security boundaries can also exists in the form of the kind of programs that you are willing to accept into your system. Vanguard has been shown to disable programs on a user's computer instead of simply giving event notifications that it is finding itself incompatible with software that may be installed on the user's device, and simply shutting off the instance of league of legends when it's turned on, which is bad. No ohter kernel level anti cheat does this. The argument for having vanguard at the boot, while understandable to make it harder for the game to exploit by increasing the knowledge required for exploiting the anti cheat, there has to be some level of cost to reward ratio when exploring these benefits. It must be accepted that with any level of cheating there will always be users that will get around the cheat, and I would argue personally the level of invasion for vanguard to be on at all times outside of when the user explicitly turns it off has crossed the threshold of what user's should accept onto theri system. You made the argument "I can just turn off the start up program through task manager, and simply turn it off when I'm done" is an ofuscation to the overall problem presented with the premise. Most users are not goint o know how to turn off start up programs when turning off vanguard, and it shouldn't ever be the case that a user has to go out of their way to turn off a program on their computer. Justifying those kinds of actions is problematic. The executable vs Kernel argument also is an ofuscation to the overall problem being presented here, and I don't know why it's even being mentioned here. The only decent point here is that any level of exploit can be dangerous if given enough time and permissions, but that doens't disolve the fact that Vanguard could be used for malicious intentions by Riot themselves or even by other actors in the future if Vanguard itself becomes exposed. There is a popular rumor that's going around right now that Korea's anti cheat was exposed when Riot's info was dumped last year, as there has been a series of DDOS attacks happening to specifically the teams in these regions being unable to play for months at a time based off a cheat potentially made by players that exploits the information given by a kernel level system. Dismissing that there won't be any negative outcomes at all through Vanguard is simply Naive to say. Just like any other system that you download, the user simply needs to make the choice of whether or not they want to trust the system that is being installed onto their system. In my opinion, I do think Vanguard is problematic in the way that it is implemented today when compared to other anticheats, not because of the ownership of the program, but the level of invasion that this program is going against, and the track record that Riot has with their own software.

How much did Tencent pay you? You started your youtube channel just to espouse the virtues of vanguard?

Hell mother fucking no if you need to explain for that long why it's okay just do it . Naw I'm out can't sell me rip league

Uninstalled, was playing since 2013, and I don't want them having that level of access. You can argue that they could steal data and gain access without Kernel Level Access. But with it, they can do a lot more.

Im not installing rootkit to play a game.

Glad I quit League in February 2024. Saved myself from having to buy a new computer, after Vanguard would brick it.

No more league for me. I had some stability issues, i dont know if it was vanguard's fault but it seems like my pc works bettee of without Riots malware

The reason why I love Linux is that you can very easily sandbox applications, especially Windows applications running. So even if an attack like this is done on a closed source program, I am not affected ideally.

I like to think I'm tech savvy, and I have been getting more into security lately. There might be more nuances that you didn't cover, but I don't know enough to be able to say that. Regardless, you've *literally* completely changed my mind on this. Very well done. That said I will probably not be re-installing league and/or vanguard.

interesting video, thanks

I genuinely thought this channel had millions of followers based off the quality. the viewability of this is insane. sorry the views don't reflect but based off of this it won't be long. good luck❤

Luckily I dont like these games and have always played their alternatives.

ive been playing since beta (got invite key) but i uninstalled after all those years because of that "legal" malware, no matter how good excuses will be, there is no way they would need that access to ur pc just to get rid of cheaters

This shit fucked my laptop cooler fk riot

I'm just frustrated that they won't work on a linux version now i needed to spend very much time in hackintosh or installing windows and i got windows 10 just for LoL and i wait for the time to uninstall it again

It's a twofold reason for me to quit at this point. Been casually in normals for years and despite such a laid-back relationship with league, recent events just pushed me away. It may be directly related to the vanguard rollout, but for about a month before it happened I noticed that the prevalence of bots in my PVP normal SR games was extra insane. In every game about half the players involved were always bots. Perhaps this may have been common for others on other servers or with different gamemodes or mmr or whatever, but this was the biggest influx of obvious bots that I *personally* ever experienced in all my time playing. Apart from like, the Twisted Treeline days. So here I was thinking, "wow, what a perfect time for Vanguard to rollout." But the coincidental timing of it all, along with the fact that it didn't seem to actually prevent bots from what I experienced afterward, just destroyed the miniscule faith I had in riot. Assuming they allowed bots to run wild in prep for Vanguard, for me to endorse a security risk that didn't solve my main issue in a timely manner, resulting in system hiccups both in and out of gameplay, AND noticeably worse ping....it's just the perfect excuse to dip. As a 10-year-long casual player, my league experience has been the worst it's ever been in the past couple months, and for once it was not even due to the player base OR game balance, or even the crappy client. Before, I could at least drain some enjoyment out of league so long as the balance wasn't egregiously awful and my chat was disabled. So now it's gone and I have an opening in my weekly entertainment slot.

Vanguard has marked the end of my league tenure.

I quit lol

I have played League since 2011. Thousands of hours. I now for the first time in 11 years have uninstalled league and have no plans on installing it again. Vanguard having to start on boot and it messing with my fan control software (it literally turned off my fans!) is out of the question. I love TFT but my computer is too important to mee that I can just let software like vanguard run unchecked on it.

My main concern is less that the Chinese Government would spy on me amd more that Vanguard could have some vulnerability that third party actors could use the gain access to the kernel level of my PC.

As someone who has installed Vanguard. I can say the following... Vanguard, while it is loaded on startup, it does not run in the background at all. Open up your Task Manager, go to "Services" and look for "vgc" If you have not started up any games made by Riot that require it's functionality, it will say "Stopped" in the status. Once you open a game (League or Valorant) You see the service Go from "Stopped" to "Starting" and then to "Running" And once you close out of the game the service goes from "Running" to "Stopped" So this panic about it running in the background doesn't make sense. It stays on your system and only starts up when the game itself is launched. Try it out for yourself and you will see for yourself.

Vanguard stutters my PC so much making it unable to play lol, also the fact that it runs 24/7 is a no go for me. Playing since 2009 but sorry I can't continue with this, riot fix that vanguard and ditch it from lol today! Or lose people. For a non fps game it doesn't make any sense

The point here is any software that runs at kernel level that is not from the operating system itself is a potential vulnerability that someone might find a way to exploit, multiple things can go wrong, a rogue developer inside riot can intentionally add a vulnerability, someone outside riot can find a vulnerability... at this point that kernel software can be used to do things that it was not designed for, and people haven't yet learn the lesson with other kernel anti-cheats, like it's not the first time we had news about a kernel anti-cheat being used to mine bitcoins, or someone using a vulnerability to shut down your anti-virus and insert their malware into those computers... And I think that a company that suffers major leaks of information in any way or form shouldn't even be considered to have kernel access. Simple put in a short sentence: Any computer with a third party kernel application is not a trusted platform, I would not check my home banking account on that computer or do any kind of transaction with it. All this security issues just for the sake of ensuring fair play is not a compromise we should be doing.... by the end of the day those kinds of software only cares about game integrity and do not care if your computer is hacked or compromised... Game developers need to stop being lazy and fix the game vulnerabilities server side. Specially with a game that should run mostly on server side like a moba.

2:22 You said other anti-cheats start only with a game while using ring zero. Really? Thought maybe i misheard and you was comparing vanguard to anti-cheat without kernel access but no. So, unintentionally misleading or straight lying? Your only other argument against Vanguard is that LOL owned by chinese company. If this is the main problem you can throw all your electronics to trash can cuz its made in China. Jokes aside if we talking about personal data, no one will bother using vanguard or classical trojans to get it. Most users give this information for free willingly. Do you think chenese hackers care about what pron you watch? ) With conclusion like "and this is why i uninstalled the game" from someone who claims he's security specialist i think its classical example of Dunning-Kruger. Also if we will leave only those two arguments and remove emotions/manipulations, video will be 40sec at max. Feels like watching political propaganda on tv.

great video thanks for sharing

all this excuses for why it is not so bad to have a ring 0 piece of software controlling from the integrity of windows API calls all the way to taking actual screenshots of your displays ring hollow. you wouldn't let any game company do this to your phone, why allow it in your PC?

Personally, it didn´t do anything to my pc... the first time. After I restarted, my performance went to hell. I have 2019 pc, not the newest but it used to run League perfectly fine, well above the "high" settings and an average of 140 fps... now it struggles to ago above 50 fps, pc overheats, and lags. I ended up uninstalling vanguard and immediately fixed everything. So, after 8 years playing... no more league of legends for me I guess

i uninstalled it already since march im from philippines knowing riot is in tencent now which is a chinese company that has roots from ccp i didnt care because they didnt have a way to spy on me since riot is the one handling everything on the game however as soon as they put vanguard which has kernel access and has performance problems i didnt want it and china and philippines has a teritorial problem right now so nope

I feel like this is under researched. No real discussion of hardware based cheating methods making these anti cheats less useful, no mention that if a supply chain attack occurs with vanguard, then basically anyone who installs this will be vulnerable to, say, ransomware. Riot has had too many breaches for this to be acceptable. It's a rootkit owned by a chinese based tech conglomerate which requires them to assist the CCP whenever possible. You wouldn't trust facebook with unrestricted 24/7 access to your machine, why tencent? Unless vanguard is made open source it's not going on my computer. Maybe if it ran in a VM, but I'm not buying a new computer for riot.

really informative, thank you

let's be honest, how many scripters have you encountered? in my 12 years of playing I couldn't count them on the fingers of my hand wrong priorities rito, losing a lot of playerbase with this endeavour.. why do video game companies make the worst decisions in this day and age