Not that I’m defending Vanguard, but Riot’s choosing to invest in developer resources for Vanguard (and in finding cheat developers) so they don’t have to invest in server capacity or developer resources to support cheater only lobbies.
As long as their anticheat is effective, every cheater they can repel is some amount of server capacity that legitimate players can use.
Also, cheaters in the types of games Riot makes will cause some amount of opponents to simply leave the game in frustration. So part of this is just trying to keep players who are willing to install the game happy.
They’ve chosen to make free to play games, so this tradeoff actually makes sense for Riot. But again, kernel level hacks aren’t something everyone will or even should install.
It’s all about tradeoffs.
Don’t get it twisted. We definitely agree.
This will effectively add any computer it’s installed on to a botnet and create another attack vector (via Vanguard).
The tradeoff I described, tho, is one on the Riot side. And as much as this form of anticheat is ridiculous, it makes sense given Riot’s business model. A bunch of cheaters can easily waste their money and engineering effort. They made the deliberate choice to narrow their market of potential players to those who are willing to install Vanguard and feel that Vanguard pushes most cheaters out of that narrow market. It makes sense.
Re: That tradeoff, tho, users aren’t involved. The tradeoff users have is between installing the game or not.
And again we both agree, installing this to an important computer or on your home network carries a tonne of risk.