Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.
Summary:
The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.
The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.
Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.
Is there an open source MOBA? Players need an alternative, even if it’s not as good to begin with.
I mean Dota exists. I guess I’ll switch to that. Or maybe I’ll just take a shower.
Dota was the OG anyway, LOL coined the term MOBA to shift focus that they stole their gameplay mechanic from one dude, icefrog.
I remember when people used to type AoS-like game (Aeon of Strife) when hosting a similar custom map on SC or Warcraft III
i.e. DotA 5v5 AoS-like
Then after DotA got popular, it became DotA-like
i.e. Naruto Wars 5v5 DotA-like
And then that totally banger BassHunter song cemented DOTA into history forever 🎧
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Dota has always been a drastically better game, I see this as an absolute win for Linux. League is cancer.
Uhhhh no. Dota is slow and terrible. Not that I think anyone should touch that CCP spyware of a game League.
I would argue that the pacing of a Dota match is one of the many things that makes it better than League.
I find league is insanely repetitive and has very little room for player creativity or expression beyond “I can hit my skill shots”. It’s just rote exercise that you can map out to the minute. Dota gives heroes and players space to breathe and flexibility to play in multiple ways, not to mention having a balance team that actually wants to balance the game, not just sell the latest champions.
Whew, I can tell you never got particularly good at league. You’re probably right about macro decisions and definitely right about new champions being OP on release, but matchups and micro interactions are where it’s at!
That said, I’ll never play again.
Nope, I just realize how much better it can be when the dev team has creativity and respect for players.
Not that I know of, the most popular open source games I have heard of are Space Station 13 (and its newer release Space Station 14 on steam), and Beyond All Reason which is an RTS.
If we’re talking about RTSs as well, there’s 0AD, which I tried out briefly during the period between Ensemble Studios being shut down, and the revival of the Age franchise with the HD edition (over a decade ago now, and it looks like 0AD has been under constant development since then).
An open source and popular MOBA would have an even larger problem with cheating and bad actors.
Edit: people are missing the point, and I didn’t state it fully.
What open source games have moderation teams and support teams? What open source games want to deal with ban evasion? What open source games want to deal with the notoriously toxic MOBA communities?
By that logic any sever running something open source like Linux would be more vulnerable than say, Windows.
Is open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That’s not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.
Proving source code would reduce the barrier to entry for creating cheats, but cheats are very prevalent anyway. I do not want to make proprietary games so I have no choice but to find an alternative if I ever choose to make a competitive multiplayer game.
There was a MSI monitor at CES which pops-up a warning when an enemy appears on the mini-map in LoL. Significant cheats may be accessible without going to shading sites (perhaps kernel-level anti-cheat could have some success to figure out what monitor you’re using but my understanding is that’s easily fooled in software and perhaps undetectable via hardware video splinters). Cheats which do not run on the host machine at all are undetectable by traditional anti-cheats.
I think the end-game of anti-cheat is intolerable. Can one get enough data for machine learning to determining if a player is cheating without a high error rate (banning false positives)? Would players tolerate having cameras recording their inputs like it’s a submitted speedrun or an exam during Covid?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
very prevalent
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Chess.
I rest my case.
… No I don’t, actually, I have more opinions! Come back!
I feel like being stringently anti-cheat about video games over internet is grasping at wind. Better to be more relaxed, accept that some will cheat and ‘earn’ themselves a higher elo than they can actually play, and encourage a player base to care about enjoying the game, and to care about winning/enjoying without cheats. If you have to encourage a fanatic player base who would do anything including cheat to get a leg up, maybe you too are forgetting this is only a game.
And for serious competition? Let the tournament organisers provide the hardware on location.
osu! is a competitive game that is open source, and its arguably the most popular rhythm game right now and there’s not much of a cheating problem.
You’re right about osu! Although it’s probably one of the few competitive games where there’s no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn’t directly affect your gameplay experience.
It’s not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don’t think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.