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Earlier this week, Riot Games deployed a patch for League of Legends that introduced new anti-cheat software to curb “scripters, botters, and cheaters.” Unfortunately, players reported issues with the popular MOBA following the update, saying that the new anti-cheat program had bricked their PCs. Riot Games has responded to the dilemma claiming that, nah, everything is working as intended.
On April 30, Riot Games announced that patch 14.9 would hit League of Legends on May 1. Alongside some balance changes and bug fixes, the new update also implemented Vanguard, the studio’s proprietary anti-cheat software. Already deployed in Riot Games’ tactical hero shooter Valorant, Vanguard was meant to free up queues from folks attempting to exploit League of Legends by setting up traps in a “cat and mouse game,” as the studio explained in a very detailed blog post about the program. That’s all well and good, but immediately after going live, some people took to social media sites like Reddit and X/Twitter to complain about the issues they’d run into.
Specifically, League of Legends players reported that right after updating the game to the new version with Vanguard in the backend, their PCs were bricked. They’d either get stuck in infinite boot-loops or were allegedly forced to delete drivers. Strange. The problem seems to stem from some sort of compatibility problem with Windows 11, though as noted by IGN, Riot Games said in a lengthy post on the game’s subreddit that Vanguard isn’t bricking PCs.
“At this point in time, we have not confirmed any instances of Vanguard bricking anyone’s hardware, but we want to encourage anyone who’s having issues to contact Player Support so we can look into it and help out,” a Riot Games community manager wrote in League of Legends official subreddit. “We’ve individually resolved a few of the major threads you may have seen so far of users claiming this with their machines and have confirmed that Vanguard wasn’t the cause of the issues they were facing.”
Riot Games stated that “fewer than 0.03% of players have reported issues with Vanguard,” and while the company says Vanguard is not the cause of any issues it’s identified, it also provided some troubleshooting tips for folks who do experience problems following the update.
League of Legends streamer and pro player Nick “LS” De Cesare was seemingly able to get one of his PCs working again, though he had to take additional steps—like removing the battery—to do so. Unfortunately, another PC he has with League of Legends installed on it is still bricked at the time of writing.
Kotaku has reached out to Riot Games for comment.
In other League of Legends news—because this is ridiculous and I feel like it must be talked about—a pro player was suspended and fined nearly $7,000 at the end of April for humping a stuffed teddy bear during a livestream. What in the world is going on?