Riot Games is already chalking the rollout of its kernel-level anti-cheat system Vanguard into League of Legends as a huge success, with the publisher proudly declaring its taken great strides to obliterating botting and cheating profiles.
Vanguard has put a “hefty dent” in botting in League queues, with bot play hours already slumping from more than a million a day to less than five thousand. Another 3.5 million slave bot accounts waiting to be sold were also pinged and shut down. “The idea there,” Riot’s head of anti-cheats Phillip Koskinas explained in the Aug. 22 blog on the topic, “is to lowly dehydrate the market for secondary accounts.”
The storm of bans and Vanguard pings has seen “games with hours wasted” (one of the biggest metrics the League developers track) now barely appear in trackers. Only one minor spike appeared around July this year for around seven to 10 days; Riot’s teams were on holidays for two-ish weeks.
Riot’s successes against botting should trickle down to solve other League issues too: With fewer accounts available on secondary markets—most of which are levelled through scripting softwares before sales—Riot believes there will simply be less smurfs in queues across Summoner’s Rift and Howling Abyss.
The League devs are also celebrating a massive drop in scripting. With more than 175,000 accounts banned (and more on the way) the number of scripters has sagged down to less than one percent for the first time in four years.
“Updating LoL’s anti-cheat has achieved a great many of our goals,” Koskinas declared, “and it’s been an immediate win bringing LoL’s anti-cheat system into this century.”
Eyes at Riot are now turn to the future, with the work “never finished.” There’s already plans to amp up Vanguard again soon as cheaters continue to look for unfair advantages, including more permanent bans, more coding work on the detection processes, and an expansion into macOS as cheaters flee to Apple devices.
Perhaps best of all, the League devs have also promised to set Vanguard to start when the game client fires up. Said Koskinas, “You won’t have to tolerate the taskbar icon forever.”
