Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux
3 years ago by alessandro to c/pcgaming
A random day months after announcing they would break it on Linux. I think the numbers before the Vanguard announcement would be far more representative.
Sort of unfair when weirdly enough MacOS is ok tho, they didn't consider anything, simply decided not to.
Honestly, supporting linux makes absolutely no sense for vanguard.
If you use vanguard, it's because you're fine with a company taking full control of your system, installing a rootkit tracking your every move.
If you use Linux, at least part of the reason is because you want to take control over your computer back.
To support vanguard on linux, you'd have had to run vanguard as hypervisor with linux running in a para-VM, or you'd have had to modify most of the linux kernel to add tracking and control capabilities that'd never get merged upstream and would break with every update.
The resulting system would be closer to android or a playstation than to actual linux distros.
Rootkits are dumb because the gaming industry is not trying with their anti-cheat software. It is so easy to cheat in these games even with a rootkit that it’s unbelievable.
Since the industry is moving this direction, I would like it far more if the OS just had a mode that essentially separated your normal OS from one used to play Esports titles. Put a wall between those operating modes, get rid of the desktop, and only boot the game and maybe a control panel.
The OS can then dump whatever it wants to the game without the game having control of my entire PC and file system. This seems like an obvious solution since it’s kind of the best of consoles without the worst of consoles.
That's still not gonna help at all. There are already hardware cheats using an nvidia jetson nuc, an hdmi splitter, and a usb interceptor plugged between mouse, keyboard and computer.
Using just image recognition and slight adjustments to your mouse movement you can already get an impossible to detect aimbot.
Now the real question is: why are cheats bad? If a cheater is flying in godmode, sure, that ruins the game. But if the game forces cheaters to play the same way top human players are playing... If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?
By just running all simulation server side and banning superhuman reactions you can easily ban all superhuman cheats. Matchmaking will just sort players by skill and you'll have a peaceful game again.
If you're playing chess, you don't know if your opponent uses a chess computer or not. And it doesn't matter. The game is still fun.
if bots played like humans, I think it’d be a different conversation but they don’t. And we don’t have a good way to restrain them into only playing like humans. Sorting people by skill is already what is being done but that also isn’t working. And most heuristics have their limits and can catch normal players.
But all of it is kind of irrelevant, most players aren’t using sophisticated cheats. They’re just injected cheats which are hard to detect within the program, hence the rootkits. Now if we could restrain them to playing like normal people, I’d still hate them because I don’t play PvP to play against bots. If people did that, then in-person chess would have no appeal.
Of course we can restrain them into playing like humans. That's the entire point.
But doing that costs a few cents more for the server operators, which is why most PvP games aren't doing that.
Minecraft PvP servers are running entirely server side anticheat, and there's still a competitive PvP community in that game.
Now if we could restrain them to playing like normal people, I’d still hate them because I don’t play PvP to play against bots.
Again, if you can't tell the difference, why does it matter if it's a bot or a person?
By the point of 'superhuman' gameplay, it's less about physical reactions and more about mental foresight or gamesense. Ducking, sliding, bhopping and any tech involved to navigate... planning how your opponent will move around your positioning in relation to their own objectives... Individual players have quirks by this point that can be discovered and exploited, and you are both playing a game to discover & exploit; Deceive & switch-up.
When someone is exclusively reacting to you perfectly rather than incorporating the above, you know. It's wildly demotivating because now we're not playing this high-skill game, we're playing a game of endurance since they always know player locations and will almost always get the first shot... The only two winning moves is you leave or the hacker leaves. It's a waste of everyone's time just for some narcissist to feel good (I can say that, I used to do it so I get the power thrill).
It sucks and anyone who's pushed their competitive gameplay to the edge will recognize a hacker when they see one. So yes, players can tell the difference (including chess players!!), it's the anti-cheat that can't. Kind-of like how that one MS guy discovered a backdoor due to a 500ms delay, but a virus protector sees everything hunky-dory.
Source: used to religiously/no-life play competitively
Also, no, matchmaker will not separate these people appropriately. The cheaters will smurf just to dunk on lower-skill players. You can buy game-keys on russian websites for dirt cheap, so it's very worth it if you have the $$$ to burn. Path of least resistance to feeling power.
If you're always reacting perfectly, that too can be discovered and used to ban people.
Also, regarding cheap game keys, those would be useful for one or two matches before they'd be banned.
For reference, all Minecraft PvP anticheat is 100% serverside, and yet a competitive PvP community exists.
I'm actually grateful for this. Vanguard was exactly what I needed to stop playing the game. I had an unhealthy relationship with it and this actually helped me.
All the more reason to play Dota 2 instead
Curious - why? I've played LOL and the Blizzard one, but I never tried Dota 2
Too many distros so they can't fully secure it. And if they did target just one distro the blowback would be intolerable as always. Currently only 800 players through lutris so its just not worth the investment. I get their reasoning it just sucks
And if they did target just one distro the blowback would be intolerable as always.
Would it be? Steam officially only supported (maybe still does) Ubuntu for a long time and I've never seen much blowback.
There was quite a lot when it came out, it died out after a while. There is far less for the steamos now based on arch but I think thats because its just on the steamdeck and they haven't prevented other distros from being ported to the hardware
I feel that the 800 players count is severely misleading counting, they've announced no Linux support and vanguard changes for months now most people already stopped playing LoL on linux, this 800 number is counting now not a accumulative number.
Basically they pulled skewed and cherry picked metrics showing extremely low Linux activity to justify locking those players out of playing their game. It's scummy and their "trust me bro" attitude towards vanguard should be concerning more than anything.
What I took away from this article was that there's a shit load of cheaters in LoL, 15% of ranked matches or something like that had cheaters or smurfs. 1 in 10 games in NA and 1 in 5 matches in Europe is just insane.
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I appreciate that Riot at least took the time to consider supporting Linux and explaining the situation to the community. Unfortunate that I won't be able to play League of Legends anymore but I guess there's not that much momentum behind a community of only ~800 daily users. Looking forward to switching to DotA.
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