'We have not confirmed any instance of Vanguard bricking anyone's hardware' following its League of Legends rollout, Riot says, but there are definitely problems for some players

In response to multiple complaints of hardware failure following the rollout of its Vanguard anti-cheat software to League of Legends, Riot Games says it has «not confirmed any instance of Vanguard bricking anyone's hardware» but acknowledged that some BIOS settings could be causing headaches for a small number of players.

The controversial Vanguard anti-cheat software has been live in Riot's shooter Valorant since the game launched in 2020, but it didn't come to League of Legends until earlier this week, as part of the 14.9 patch. Reports of serious trouble quickly followed: Players said their PCs were crashing, stuck in reboot loops, and in some cases «bricked»—rendered completely inoperable—following the update.

In response to the complaints, Riot said on Reddit that «overall, the rollout has gone well,» and that «fewer than 0.03% of players have reported issues with Vanguard.» It also said that after resolving «a few of the major threads» about PCs being bricked, it has confirmed that Vanguard wasn't actually the cause.

«About ~0.7% of the playerbase bypassed Microsoft’s enforcement for TPM 2.0 when they installed Windows 11, but the rollout of Vanguard requires that those playersnow enable it to play the game,» Riot said. «This requires a change to a BIOS setting, which differs based on the manufacturer. Vanguard does not and cannot make changes to the BIOS itself.»

TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 is a security feature that was made mandatory for Windows 11—sort of. There was initially confusion about whether «older» PCs would support it and if TPM 2.0 was actually required at all ahead of the Windows 11 rollout, and then Microsoft muddied the waters further by telling people how to bypass it completely while upgrading from Windows 10 to Win11. As we noted at the time, the whole thing was confusing and frustrating, but it did open an avenue to a Windows 11 upgrade for people who didn't have, or didn't enable, TPM 2.0 support on their PCs.

Unfortunately, that