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Vanguard in action (Source - Google)
League of Legends recently received the Vanguard anti-cheat update and players are now flooding social media, particularly X, claiming that their PCs are getting bricked due to Vanguard.
Vanguard is Riot’s in-house anti-cheat solution that was introduced with Valorant and has been quite effective. The result is almost no cheating problem in Valorant at the price of kernel-level access to the Vanguard of your PC.
The success of Vanguard prompted Riot Games to implement the same in League of Legends and on May 1, after the update, players started reporting the issue. Players claim that the Vanguard has been 'tampering with unrelated files' which caused the problem.
Riot is denying that Vanguard is bricking people's PCs, and any kind of Vanguard discussion is banned from the sub.
— Yasukeh (@yasubro) May 1, 2024
It's tampering with unrelated files, preventing startup programs from booting, causing other programs to crash, etc.
All this was known and they still launched. https://t.co/cTWWmPioIh pic.twitter.com/PO6NW6kpGJ
Multiple popular content creators were reporting the same issue causing a huge uproar in the community. Those who were against Vanguard have doubled down on the matter, citing other concerns like privacy.
Update: after taking out CMOS battery and resetting battery was able to finally get into BIOS and fix PC w/ Vanguard running (you need UEFI and TPM2.0 both enabled in BIOS or your PC wont load). Other computer still bricked though. pic.twitter.com/f6aWHUYDHk
— H. Baker (@LSXYZ9) May 1, 2024
Riot addresses the backlash
Responding to the backlash by the community, Riot Games said that the issue people are complaining about accounts for 0.03% of the players in a Reddit post. They further said most issues were common and could be removed through troubleshooting.
For those complaining about a bricked PC, Riot said, “We have not confirmed any instances of Vanguard bricking anyone’s hardware, but we want to encourage anyone who's having issues to contact Player Support so we can look into it and help out.”
This is not something that came out recently, as many were already opposing the implementation of Vanguard in the first place since the announcement. The issues with Vanguard as per Riot could be caused by players bypassing TPM 2.0 in Windows 11 which Vanguard requires.
They further went on to explain what Vanguard can or cannot do and offer solutions. Regarding the anti-cheat starting on boot, Riot said that Vanguard just loads on boot but does nothing unless any Riot game is activated.