League of Legends Dev Tracker

Tools that use the API in an authorized way, like Porofessor, will still be ok to use.

Non-malicious usages of AHK should be ok, especially if it's not actively trying to continually interact with League. You should still be able to modify input.ini and persistedsettings.json regardless, though. Let us know if anything doesn't work as intended!

We have seen players unknowingly buy banned hardware that caused a ban. It is a niche case, but we do handle these escalations in Player Support.

You can follow the procedures here:

https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001299888-Requesting-Your-Account-Data

For context on Anti-Cheat and privacy, you can read the Anti-Cheat and Fraud section here: ...

More like it's based to say "I'm skeptical, I'm gonna wait and see", that's a pretty healthy take when it comes to software and the permissions you allow or grant. There's nothing wrong with that. We even say in the article that if Riot hasn't earned your trust then don't install our games.

Right click Vanguard in System Tray

Click Exit Vanguard

Click Yes

Those are the steps to disabling Vanguard when you're not using it. It's intentionally easy to disable (and even Uninstall is virtually the same flow) to help make folks like yourself feel in control of what they're comfortable with.

but is there no way to turn it off whilst you're not playing.

You can right click Vanguard in your system tray and select Exit Vanguard.

While I'm sure the work you do is cool, unless you're creating cheats, or you're like loading libraries into League or something, Vanguard will be totally disinterested :)

In case you didn't get to the bottom of the article, Phillip touches on what kinds of data Vanguard looks at here:

Riot only collects what we need to run and secure our games. More data is just more risk for us, and we don't want anything except the bare minimum required to get the job done. Locally, Vanguard has system hooks to run its protections, but we're not shipping back your files or documents. Like most anti-malware and anti-cheat systems, we leverage a technique called "Signature Scanning," to determine if a series of bytes in memory matches a known cheating application. The results of these are only true or false (it was present or it wasn't), and we try to use this pattern for other checks too. Things like, "are you currently using a DMA device" or "did an application just...

We've already done some actioning on TFT bots, and Vanguard will further help with prevention and detection of those. They are prohibited under section 7.10 of the Terms of Use, and while they're not as painful to players as other bots because it can be inflationary towards top 4 finishes, they still do affect competitive integrity and the actual fun of the game.

...

As someone that once worked on WoW and is intimately aware of the botting problem that game has even with the Anti Cheat tools it has. I say with the upmost respect and confusion: bruh

In case you read this RISK team, hi, love you all. Keep killing it, yall are badasses.

We have an allowlisting system for PC Cafes, and also review tickets for players who state they may have gotten banned by one that could have not been on the list.

In terms of using your brothers computer that would be infected by cheats, it is a risk. We do look to have our Hardware bans be preventative rather than immediately banning the account, but if you were to play on it while cheats were injected, that could cause your account to be banned.

After installing, any time you reboot your PC it'll just boot alongside it, no extra steps needed unless you want to turn it off or uninstall.

The dev of Yolomouse has stated it's working in VALORANT in their testing. It should be ok. This isn't something we'd look to ban for its current implementation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/yolomouse/comments/190g3cf/yolomouse_180/kixyeei/

There's some difficulties in implementing a toggle of that nature (I'm sure one of my more technical colleagues could speak to the effort involved, but an example that springs to mind is how to reliably tell a program to generally not launch on boot, except next time I reboot please do.")

I think if this is how you'd want to interact with Vanguard (which is great if it will help you feel authoritative about what you're comfortable with!), probably currently the avenue I'd suggest is to actually Uninstall Vanguard when you're not planning on playing LoL for a few days - it's also just a right click away (Right Click > More > Uninstall Vanguard > Confirm).

Then the next time you Launch LoL, Riot Client will prompt you to install Vanguard. Happily, the download + install is SUPER quick (my entire Riot Vanguard folder is 43 MB), so this flow actually wouldn't add much time to your get-in-game, as the reboot itself will probably be the longest part if you have broadband...

It's best outlined under "Q: Why not open source the driver?". If every bit of telemetry was provided, it would make us lose our effectiveness.

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.