The massive 23-minute dev blog Riot Games put out for the upcoming Season 2024 of League of Legends was jam-packed 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 used exclusively for VALORANT.

Vanguard on League of Legends

VALORANT players will be quite familiar with Vanguard since it has been tied to the shooter since its release years back. For a proprietary anti-virus that came bundled with the game, Vanguard performed better than expected, and was quite reliable albeit not perfect – but no anti-cheat is. In Riot's constant arms race versus the hackers, they are now implementing Vanguard on League of Legends too, so no more sketchy Xeraths hitting every skillshot or that incredibly slippery Ezreal you can't seem to land anything on.

Vanguard is a kernel-level anti-cheat, which translated in layman's terms, means that it has heightened 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, and added that Vanguard will not gather any more information than the previous anti-cheat that League of Legends ran on.

What does this mean for League of Legends players?

Firstly, it would make launching the game trickier. The only way to start Vanguard is upon booting up your PC, and it's an always-on anti-cheat. Meaning, even if you have no intentions of playing League of Legends or VALORANT in this session, Vanguard will still be running in the background. Some players have found it best to close Vanguard if they didn't intend to play for security and peace of mind reasons. If you did close Vanguard and want to play League, you would have to reboot your PC to start Vanguard up again.

League of Legends having a more robust anti-cheat means there would (hopefully) be fewer scripters in a game, and Riot Games revealed that if a cheater was detected in the game, the match would instantly end with all LP being refunded except to those with detected cheats. Vanguard will introduce hardware bans to cheaters, meaning that these bad actors would have to swap out their whole rig if they want to play again once they've been banned.

However, a collateral damage of this would be the modding community: those who apply client-side mods to add custom champion skins and map skins. Prominent content creator and custom-skin user Maks “Drututt” Przychodzień expressed his sadness toward the news, saying “This is a very sad day, riot announcing that vanguard will now be mandatory to play league is pretty much confirmation that custom skins will now be pretty much unuseable [sic].

Small community of people that put lots of work/passion into creating those silly mods just got a huge middle finger from riot.

Big part of my stream is highlighting those silly mods, it just brings a lot of joy to me playing raiden from MGR vs f—ing boba fett from star wars.”

Drututt'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 will no longer be viable and finding a new one would simply be too much work.

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