Wow, who could have anticipated that kernel-level anti-cheat was a bad idea? It’s like people haven’t been warning that giving an increasing number of programs that level of access might be a Bad Idea.
Kernel-level anti cheat is spyware, say it with me everybody. Complain on steam about it. Post this nonstop. This standard is NOT OK and needs to change and that’s the only way it might.
Why complain on Steam? If I remember correctly, League of Legends is downloaded through its own installer and it’s completely separate to Steam
I would never let some random anticheat code have kernel access. Games are demanding something crazy, and users are stupidly letting them get it.
It’s not just silently installed by Steam, or something, they have to explicitly confirm they accept it? I don’t play this game, I am curious if players are unaware or actively stupid.
Riot’s games can only be played with their own launcher, so no steam. They give a big message about “now installing vanguard, our anticheat,” then inform you to reboot to finish the install, since vanguard is the only ring 0 anticheat that puts itself into the kernel start up, always running.
The first time I installed Vanguard, for the Valorant beta, it decided to disable my mouse and keyboard on each boot.
This is why I absolutely refuse to install Valorant (and now LoL) - I could somewhat understand if an anticheat refused to boot up the game in question if something triggered it, but it going massively outside of its scope and wantonly disabling or killing other processes is just nuts to me.
To be fair, if they were typical RBG mouse and keyboard, and you used the brands software to change their settings, it blocked that software. Those programs were absolute dog shit in terms of security. I have no idea if it forced them to make better software, or Riot just started to allow them. Regardless it’s all pointless because Vanguard has been defeated. Imagine making ring 0 anticheat that loads on boot, and it still isn’t good enough, fucking LoL pun intended.
Both had optional software, and I only used the keyboard. The software didn’t have to be running for either to work, it was only to configure it and then it wrote the configuration to onboard memory. It was the generic mouse and keyboard input drivers provided by Windows that was blocked and it affected a pretty significant number of users.
Someone is having me “fix their pc” to work with it and they understand the problem but say “i only play a little” and “it’s really important to me”
They asked about getting a separate computer just for the game
