What Riot Vanguard Means for League of Legends Players

The massive 23-minute dev blog Riot Games released for League of Legends’ upcoming season 2024 was full of new information, including improvements to League’s ant-cheat. They announced that LoL will now use Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary anti-cheat previously only used for VALORANT.

Vanguard on League of Legends

VALORANT players will be very familiar with Vanguard as it has been associated with the shooter since its release years ago. For a proprietary anti-virus that was bundled with the game, Vanguard performed better than expected, and was quite reliable, though not perfect – but no anti-cheat. In Riot’s continuing arms race against Hackers, they’re now implementing Vanguard on League of Legends as well, so you can’t land anything on sketchy Xeraths or that incredibly slippery Ezreal that kills every skillshot anymore.

Vanguard is a kernel-level anti-cheat, which translates into layman’s terms, meaning it has elevated permissions on your PC. There have been security concerns over Vanguard and other kernel-level anti-cheats in the past, but Riot Games reiterated that they are not interested and will not take your personal data, adding that Vanguard will not collect any more information than previous adversaries. -League of Legends running cheats.

What does this mean for League of Legends players?

First, it will make the game harder to start. The only way to start Vanguard is to boot your PC, and it’s always-on anti-cheat. Meaning, even if you have no intention of playing League of Legends or VALORANT this session, Vanguard will still be running in the background. Some players have found it best to turn Vanguard off if they do not intend to play for security and peace of mind reasons. If you have closed Vanguard and want to play League, you will need to reboot your PC to start Vanguard again.

League of Legends having a stronger anti-cheat means fewer scripters in the game (hopefully) and Riot Games announced that if a cheater is detected in the game, the match will end immediately with all but LP refunded. With detected cheats. Vanguard will introduce hardware bans to cheaters, meaning these bad actors will have to swap out their entire rig if they want to play again after being banned.

However, the collateral damage of this will be to the modding community: those who apply client-side mods to add custom champion skins and map skins. Prominent content creator and custom-skin user Max “Drutt” Przykodzien Expressed his grief As for the news, “It’s a very sad day, Riot announcing that Vanguard will now be mandatory for League play pretty much confirms that custom skins will now be pretty useless (sic).

The small community of people who put a lot of work/passion into making those stupid mods got a huge middle finger from Riot.

A big part of my stream is highlighting those stupid mods, it brings me a lot of fun playing MGR vs f—ing boba fett from Star Wars.”

Drutt’s tweet also came with a screencap of a Discord message from a custom skin-maker saying that the current method of applying custom skins would no longer be viable and that it would be worthwhile to invent a new one.

League of Legends will depend on Vanguard in the coming months. More information can be found here on the Vanguard FAQ posted on the official League of Legends support forum.