Riot Games‘ kernel-level anti-cheat, Vanguard, has received an update that is allegedly altering system firmware to remove the ability of the user to access certain hardware associated with cheating.
Riot Games quoted one post discussing the anti-cheat, replying “congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight.” But how exactly does Vanguard’s new system make “paperweights” out of hardware?



Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you’re submitting before posting to see if it’s already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
Don’t share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don’t want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
PM a mod to add your own
Video games
Generic
Help and suggestions
What dummies. Even if you are cheating, violating a TOS doesn’t give them the right to violate the law.
Shouldn’t that be insanely illegal? This is literally malware. Even if someone is outright hacking into your servers, you can’t just hack back and ruin their system. There’s a reason the legal side is not supposed to resort to illegal actions, the fuck.
I dunno’, that’s kinda exactly what “scammer payback” does. Though that’s slightly different than them ‘just’ hacking you.
Still agreed that doing it over a video game is just crazy.
Reckless behavior. Don’t trust a game company to exercise this extreme level of control over a device that you are supposed to own.
Just say no to kernel anti-cheat.
Yeah your game is so important that you get to destroy people’s hardware? Shit should be illegal.
A kernel level anticheat is basically spyware in all but name and stated benign purpose. This if true is getting on the malware territory. Like who is responsible on the case of false positives.
“Our games are so important that we need your help to break devices that your customers plug in to your products”
They sound quite smug now, let’s see when it inevitably triggers on someone’s legitimate hardware.
They already probably did, and I don’t they care, good luck winning that legal case.
They’re Riot Games. They’ll always be smug.
That’s definitely too heavy handed. It’s not uncommon for anti cheat to flag someone erroneously, and to just hand an executioner the ability to nuke your computer without any form of redress is asinine and anti consumer, if not criminal.
Yup, these systems have a history of false positives and flagging legitimate programs as cheating software and messing with a users system, using cheat software or not, to this extent is just absolutely wrong.
It’s a big reason for me why I stopped buying and playing these types of games.
Don’t worry, it’ll only go off if it thinks you’re cheating.
On one side, I love how it breaks cheaters hardware, should not have cheated… eh?
On the other side, worried that it might and will break non-cheaters hardware sooner or later.
I think even breaking hardware that you know is only for cheating should still never be done. It’s a game, it does not matter that much. Hopefully this results in a lawsuit
seriously. surely they can fingerprint the offender’s PC and just ban both the account and the PC fingerprint.
You know the later will happen so frequently that it barely makes up benefits of the former.