Vanguard for League of Legends: All You Need to Know

Vanguard is Riot Games’ custom game security software, specifically designed to uphold the highest levels of competitive integrity for Riot titles. It was first introduced for Valorant and has now been extended to League of Legends. Vanguard basically consists of a separate client that runs while League of Legends is active and a kernel mode driver.

Talking about Vanguard, Riot Games, in its recent blog post, said, "Anti-cheat is a shadowy game, and the darkness we usually operate in has the unfortunate side-effect of generating a lot of confusion, concern, and frankly, misinformation. So strap in, and we'll try to shine the brightest light possible on just how Vanguard gets the job done."

Vanguard for League of Legends At a Glance

Before getting into the details of the anti-cheat software, let's take a look at when you can expect Vanguard to go live on League servers. According to Riot K3O, Riot's target patch for Vanguard is 14.8 for the region of Philippines and LoL Patch 14.9 for the rest of the Riot regions. As per Riot Games' official schedule for patches, the dates for the two LoL patches are as follows:

• LoL Patch 14.8: 17th April

• LoL Patch 14.9: 1st May

Now, back to the workings of Vanguard, Riot Games acknowledged that League of Legends is a fairly secure video game. This is because the server simulates the entirety of the game state, and the client is really only responsible for making "requests" to it. As a result, there are not many exploits in the game but the game suffers from occasional "scripting" or more technically, input automation.

In its findings, Riot said that in recent months, as many as 1 in 15 games globally had a scripter or botter in it, but in some regions, this number was as high as 1 in 5. The blog added, "Cheating isn't really region-specific, cheaters just go wherever cheating is easiest. In eastern countries, we see higher rates of scripting, because they're getting spillover from cheaters in China and Korea, both of which have region-exclusive anti-cheats and more importantly, identity requirements for gaming from their regional governments."

Riot Games also revealed that scripters had insane win rates and that more than 10% of Master+ games had a cheater in them. As a result, Riot Games is deploying its anti-cheat, Vanguard, in League of Legends to make the game fair and competitive for all.

Vanguard Is Transparent, Says Riot Games

Riot Games stated that it prioritized making Vanguard's integration with players' computer transparent and controllable while still keeping in tact all of its security features. This is why we can see the Vanguard icon in the System Tray when it is running. Likewise, players can also turn it off by right-clicking the icon and selecting "Exit Vanguard" if it interferes with other processes.