1y ago

Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux

www.gamingonlinux.com

This also applies to Valorant. I know a lot of people look down on both games, but it's still unfortunate for Linux to lose access to such a popular game.

I thought this part was particularly interesting:

Half of anti-cheat is making sure the environment hasn't been tampered with, and this is extremely hard on Linux by design. Any backdoors we leave open for it are ones [cheat] developers will immediately leverage for cheats

16 comments

Linux only grants access inside user space, so yeah. Says a lot about any game that refuses to adapt to that
- I get your point, but that is only 50% of the article. 800 players simply don't justify the effort of porting everything to Linux and risk more cheaters. Issues with cheaters affect the entire playerbase, not just those 800.
  I'd like more Linux compatibility in large games as much as the next guy, but I get the justification not to do it.
  
  I mean, the question should also be, does league of legends have a big enough cheating issue to justify having an invasive anti-cheat. I played the game for 10 years and not once did I knowingly encounter a cheater.
  
  Well LoL has no official Linux support, so a low current number of users is no indication of the size of the potential Linux player base.
  
  Vanguard was announced and was supposed to be added to League imminently a while ago. I stopped playing months ago as a result. I can hardly imagine that I am the only one, so the number seems cherry picked for convenience.
  I'd like to know what the average daily player count on Linux was prior to 2024, I suspect it's higher than 800.
  That said, I get the trade-off. I won't support that trade-off though because I will never agree with an anticheat implemented like Vanguard is.
Their post is a bunch of PR hidden by funnyspeak while not addressing people's concerns in any way. The worst is that they're officially ditching LoL on linux because reasons, they're forcing the anti cheat on windows BUT they can't implement it on MacOS because Apple won't allow it
- Their post is a bunch of PR hidden by funnyspeak
  I disagree, I think they said pretty plainly that they rely on security by obscurity, which is fundamentally at odds with an open platform that gives you control over your hardware. They're not wrong, they can take their shitty anti-cheat arms race and shove it.
That's ok I don't really want spyware anyway.
"They'd find our backdoors T_T"
Oh noooooo! /s
- To be fair, I think the backdoors they're referring to would be ones meant to allow Linux users to play.
  But with Riot being owned by a Chinese company, I suspect there are plenty of backdoors to go around.
Real answer: too lazy to port / not worth enough to port
I enjoyed playing TFT but this whole thing made me ditch LoL altogether some months ago. And cheaters on LoL are so rare...
- According to the original Riot post, 1 in 15 games has a cheater, and in some regions it's 1 in 5 games.
  But valorant has the same kernel anticheat, and has rampant cheating. So I don't think the new anticheat will actually help.
- Tbf they're probably rare because of the rootkit anticheat right?
  
  No, they haven't deployed the anticheat yet I think
No sweaty, angry, sexist, racist, sub-human filth League gamers on Linux? What a shame. How will Linux users ever recover knowing the trash will never leave the dumpster? I for one am completely devastated.
/s

16 comments