League of Legends Dev Tracker

We certainly did benefit from a lot of learnings from initial launch of Vanguard+VAL. We're also just in a different situation than them, which means our approach can be different. I'm happy to hear that it feels well thought out - it was a lot of work from a lot of folks, lots of cross-team collaboration and thought went into how we can launch something like this as gracefully and lovingly as we could. <3

There might be some changes in winrates at specific ranks, which I know the balance team looks at. For example, Zeri may have some noticeable dropffs in Win Rate in Masters+.

We actually did call out how software that may be obtained from ... interesting .. sources could potentially be affected in the "Q: What if I'm having technical issues with Vanguard?" section. We saw some players being affected in PBE with this:

One of the largest perpetrators recently has been the distribution of pirated software that toggles a registry option ("DevOverrideEnable") and allows "different" versions of key Windows files to be loaded into all running processes.

That being said, it's a pretty niche case. We have also seen some rare cases covered in "Q: What about false positives?" with malware, but we look to action on things that are specifically targeting the game, which these softwares will rarely do.

Secure Boot isn't a requirement for Windows 10 or Windows 11 on League of Legends. For VALORANT, it is on Windows 11.

1) I need to use PC for personal non-League stuff: I start up my PC. Vanguard automatically boots up. I go to my system tray and exit Vanguard. That means Vanguard is completely turned off and none of my activity will be monitored?

Correct, that is the flow you'd use. FWIW, Vanguard is not monitoring your activity if you're not running VAL or (soon) League anyway, but I certainly understand wanting the extra assurance, and if you do this flow, Vanguard will be completely off until you reboot your PC.

2) I want to play League after doing non-League stuff and exiting Vanguard from system tray: But I need to restart PC manually OR i need to actually try to access League client, which will then prompt me to restart PC?

Also correct. If you try to launch League without rebooting, Riot Client will tell ya you gotta restart (exact same as you'd see in VALORANT today). Else, you just reboot and Vanguard will be i...

AHK triggerbots are a form of cheating in VALORANT, and there's definitely some potential players will be using these to make crude bots in League since it'll be difficult to read and inject into memory. We don't indiscriminately ban for AHK (only targeting cheat scripts), and many players use many unrelated scripts safely, but I can't ensure long term compatibility.

Rule 7.14 of the Terms of Service covers it:

Playing on another person’s account or otherwise engaging in activity intended to “boost” an account’s status or rank;

The behavior will look similar with Vanguard, so it would be an error/game crash just like it is currently on League.

This topic is discussed in the blog under section "Q: I've heard that Vanguard bricks keyboards?", so you can get some more context there. The tl;dr though is that we moved away from the widespread vulnerable driver blocking strategy about 4 years ago, and it was only during a limited period in launch.

I wrote 4.8 and 4.9 at first too, that was my "fix".

Vanguard isn't concerned about chat stuff. Any changes to how chat punishments work would be another team.

It wasn't. We made this decision almost a year before we ever even told yall we were bringing Vanguard to League.

It doesn't feel good for Linux players but theres just sadly not enough users there for League for us to try to make that work :(.

Vanguard runs at the League Client level, so PC TFT will be Vanguarded.

Mobile TFT doesn't require Vanguard.

There're some mechanisms in place that will punish people who are obviously boosting their account by grouping with someone Vanguard identifies as cheating :)

Nah, if you have it for VAL you have it for League. :)

We do talk about false positives a bit in there but if there ever is, we'll obviously fix it, and ideally also tell you about it if it does happen. The threshold for triggering a false positive reversal is extremely low because we never want to take that risk of being unsure. We want to be as transparent as possible so that Vanguard and the team behind it has your trust and maintains it.

We're also about to be a lot more active in engaging with people claiming that they are a "false positive". We generally review almost all the ones that we see across various platforms when we can and the vast majority are either sadly not telling the truth, or simply just compromised accounts.

Yeah the article says it better than I would, so I'll just quote the bit that speaks directly to this.

Why is it always on?

Vanguard is not really "running all the time." The driver loads at boot, but nothing is making calls to it, and there's no network connectivity until you run one of Riot's games. It's literally just sitting there (menacingly), so that it can attest to the fact that nothing's happened between Windows loading and the game starting that would break the operating system.

When you launch League, the Vanguard client contacts the driver to confirm that it thinks everything is 100%, and if so, you receive a valid anti-cheat session and may connect to the game server. Instructions from the client then start enabling features within the driver to watch for things that might tamper with the signed League process and prevent them. You can always disable the driver whenever you'd like-you'll just need a fr...

There'll be a modal going out in 14.8 (currently on PBE fwiw) that will check your PC to let you know if it's ready for Vanguard. If you get an alert that something isn't right, there's troubleshooting steps and a player support link that can help you get things set up in time for launch, which is currently planned for 14.9.

Thanks for your service Packman. Waka Waka

He did mistype. We made fun of him for it. It's 14.8 and 14.9 :)