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.
Is open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That’s not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.
Proving source code would reduce the barrier to entry for creating cheats, but cheats are very prevalent anyway. I do not want to make proprietary games so I have no choice but to find an alternative if I ever choose to make a competitive multiplayer game.
There was a MSI monitor at CES which pops-up a warning when an enemy appears on the mini-map in LoL. Significant cheats may be accessible without going to shading sites (perhaps kernel-level anti-cheat could have some success to figure out what monitor you’re using but my understanding is that’s easily fooled in software and perhaps undetectable via hardware video splinters). Cheats which do not run on the host machine at all are undetectable by traditional anti-cheats.
I think the end-game of anti-cheat is intolerable. Can one get enough data for machine learning to determining if a player is cheating without a high error rate (banning false positives)? Would players tolerate having cameras recording their inputs like it’s a submitted speedrun or an exam during Covid?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
very prevalent
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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osu! is a competitive game that is open source, and its arguably the most popular rhythm game right now and there’s not much of a cheating problem.
You’re right about osu! Although it’s probably one of the few competitive games where there’s no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn’t directly affect your gameplay experience.
It’s not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don’t think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.
Chess.
I rest my case.
… No I don’t, actually, I have more opinions! Come back!
I feel like being stringently anti-cheat about video games over internet is grasping at wind. Better to be more relaxed, accept that some will cheat and ‘earn’ themselves a higher elo than they can actually play, and encourage a player base to care about enjoying the game, and to care about winning/enjoying without cheats. If you have to encourage a fanatic player base who would do anything including cheat to get a leg up, maybe you too are forgetting this is only a game.
And for serious competition? Let the tournament organisers provide the hardware on location.
It’s not so much that the source code is available. It’s that there would not be systems in place to ban cheaters, detect them, etc.
It’s open source, why would there be support teams and bans and all that?
In the past people created communities for multiplayer games around specific forums or LAN centers and sometimes hosted allow-list servers. If you didn’t play by the rules you’d get banned off the forum, and thus that server which it was tied to.
I’m not a fan of needing an account to play online and if I created a multiplayer game I don’t want to host that information in a centralized server. Perhaps there are more ways than I know but I’d be more interested in finding an alternative to this arms race of banning vs avoiding bans.
Could allow people to curate their own blacklists if they don’t want to play in groups like that, then they would have the option to play in public and online, it would be more rough and they would have to keep it up but having those tools would allow them to play publicly without needing to join a forum or group while still curating their experience. Obviously would be more work but it would be a good fallback.
If that’s too hard they’d still have the option of joining one of those groups.
An issue of users having blocklists is that they may use it against people that are merely good at playing the game.
I suppose an open source game would have no choice but to have whatever feature users are willingly to addon to their local game.
I can definately see that being a problem, all systems have their downsides. A system like that though I feel is necessary in a game with decentralized online play.
For centralized ones it doesn’t make as much sense since those already have anti-cheat (automated or human run) and bans from the service, which aren’t perfect either, innocent people often get banned when they didn’t deserve it, it’s just not as apparent because in those communities anyone banned is witch hunted afterwards, there’s a lot of appeal to authority in those communities.
All user crowd control systems, even the lack of one is going to have negative effects to their usage, even if they aren’t apparent at first.
That’s fair. But I don’t think the MOBA scene as it is would switch to small communities like that .
Also, for people wanting to cause trouble, bans are meaningless sadly. Unless you also have some rigorous system for sign up. And I guess a small community could have that. But something at scale like a popular game with millions of players can’t.
And rigorous only goes so far, before it’s impinging on privacy.
It’s a tough issue to crack. Popularity and a large scale is always the reason foe all the cheaters and trolls to come around.
Do you know if the network delay is tolerable to play with almost anyone, anywhere in the world for casual and competative MOBA games?
I see no answer to stop trolling but perhaps there is another way worth investigating for cheaters. Some companies treat piracy as people simply wanting the game without paying and would invest in DRM. Some consider it as them providing a worse service than the piracy sites so they should improve the service. Maybe cheaters are unsatified customers?
Would some cheaters be satified with in-game cheats and not look for more extreme 3rd party cheats? Suppose cheaters were provided servers as a choice (in a friendly way instead of shadow banning) which let them play against willing non-cheaters. This supposes regular players could be encouraged to fight with some level of handicap as a challenge.