Riot Games Says League of Legends' Vanguard Anti-Cheat Isn't Bricking PCs

Riot Games is standing by its decision to add its proprietary Vanguard anti-cheat system to League of Legends with update 14.9, refuting complaints that the change has bricked people’s PCs. 

After the security measure was added with 14.9, some reported (h/t PCGamesN) that their computers refused to boot, along with those who could use their computers, getting strange errors. There were also allegations that Vanguard was taking screenshots of people's machines and otherwise being very invasive and acting almost like spyware. 

Over on Reddit, Riot’s Matt ‘K30’ Paoletti, responded to the community with a statement that defended the introduction of Vanguard, discussing their initial results, and also claiming “we have not confirmed any instances of Vanguard bricking anyone’s hardware”. With this, Paoletti still encouraged people having issues to contact support. He said that they have helped some players who reported issues with their machines and they confirmed that Vanguard was not the reason for the issues.  

Paoletti also said that, “Since 14.9 went live, fewer than 0.03% of players have reported issues with Vanguard” and also touted that the anti-cheat was doing its job, saying that Riot has “already seen a hard drop off of bot accounts in the usual places, and we will continue to monitor this”. As for screenshots, he says that Vanguard doesn't take a screenshot of the whole machine, but sometimes it may take a picture of your game client when you are playing in full screen and also the region your game client is in if you are playing in windowed or borderless mode if it thinks something suspicious might be happening. 

Some are still skeptical, however. Yet, Vanguard has already been working in Valorant, so there may be a case here for Riot's take. Paoletti promised an external report in “in the coming weeks” on Vanguard and also pointed to a devblog on the implementation and a FAQ accompanying it.