Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.
Summary:
The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.
The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.
Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.
I struggle to imagine how they get training data for games and specific cheats, and data for just good players using Intuition from experience.
For CSGO it’s trivial - the “Overwatch” system literally provided demos of players cheating that the AI could learn off of. I think Valve themselves were looking into something called VACnet that kinda did the same thing.
What determines if the video is the player cheatering? The fact it was mass reported or is someone paid to confirm? Some cheats are obvious to see but many are not. Is it not true that good players can appear to be cheaters to other players lacking experience or information? There will be some false positives.
The system works by having players vote on whether a clip is cheating or not - the guidance is to vote yes if the player is cheating “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Players are weighted with a trust score (how much the majority agrees with them), so you can’t just spam “innocent” on every clip and avoid bans that way, because the system will start ignoring your votes. You must first trip something in order to get into the overwatch queue anyway, which is what VACnet is about, increasing the amount of cheaters that end up in the overwatch system.