Cheaters are nothing new in the gaming space, from an ace up the sleeve to an aimbot that’ll let you shoot a foe behind you, the cheaters are forever advancing and improving. Vanguard is quickly becoming the industry standard for Anti-Cheat.
COVID-19 saw a rise in a variety of home-bound activities, from plant growing to exercising, reading and gaming. It was also a period that was home to one of the greatest cheating booms of the modern age. PUBG, Warzone, Destiny 2 and even Among Us were all plagued with a variety of cheats. Several companies tried to combat this plague of cheating but none did so more effectively than Riot.
Valorant’s Vanguard implemented a Kernel-level anti-cheat that was highly effective against aimbots and wall-hacks (which allow cheaters to see where you are).
In an interview with The Verge, the director of Anti-cheat on Valorant Phillip Koskinas said that they didn’t see as many machine-level cheats since implementing Vanguard and that this was because it had become such a chore for cheat developers to keep up.
The result was that cheaters turned to hardware cheats. DMA or Direct Memory Access is a form of cheating that utilises a second PC connected over PCIe. This machine reads memory written to your PC and generates a radar on a second monitor, showing the location of all of your foes. However, Riot has since come up with a way to combat that as well by blocking suspicious read requests.
These advancements in anti-cheat technology have also improved League of Legends. Upon being introduced to League of Legends, Vanguard has been responsible for the banning of over 175,000 accounts linked to cheating.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean the end of cheating for all games. Developers who build their own anti-cheat face a multitude of challenges and can sometimes end up banning legitimate players.
Hopefully, Riot can assist more developers with implementing Vanguard to further improve the gaming space for us all. If you’d like to read more on Vanguard, check out the long-format piece from The Verge. It hasn’t been all smooth sailing though. You can read about the complaints related to Vanguard’s implementation in League of Legends here.
