Crashes, blue screens and broken PCs: Players report major problems with the new LoL anti-cheat, but the developers deny everything
Riot Games’ deep kernel-level anti-cheat system called Vanguard is now also mandatory in League of Legends – and is apparently causing serious problems right away.
Shortly after its release, numerous players reported that the new update had rendered their PCs practically unusable
LoL update allegedly makes PCs unusable
What exactly happened? Many users are reporting on social media like Twitter and Reddit that they are experiencing massive PC problems due to the Vanguard update.
The anti-cheat is said to cause LoL itself or other applications to crash or stop working altogether. The popular overclocking/undervolting programs MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner are cited as examples.
Even those who run a Virtual Machine
such as an Android emulator on their PC are currently experiencing problems such as blue screens.
But apparently it can get even worse: LoL-YouTuber LS reports that both of his computers were crashed
after installing Vanguard so damaged that they no longer work.
Ok I ironically updated league patch and my pc blackscreened and now won’t turn on lol what
– H. Baker (@LSXYZ9) April 30, 2024
While he managed to get one computer up and running again by removing the CMOS battery and changing the BIOS, his other computer remains unusable.
Riot denies responsibility
On Thursday night, developer Riot Games took to Reddit
  to issue a lengthy statement – denying that their anti-cheat was actually responsible for the problems that suddenly arose:Since the release of [patch] 14.9, less than 0.03 percent of players have reported issues with Vanguard. In most cases, these are common error codes such as VAN codes 128, 152, 1067, -81, 9001, or 68, which are easily resolved through player support or troubleshooting and make up the vast majority of issues we see.
The obvious problem with this: League of Legends has 130 million players a month – and not everyone is guaranteed to know what a BIOS is or how to reset it.
If such an error prevents a successful boot process for these inexperienced users, they naturally cannot create a support ticket – and may then simply assume that their system has been destroyed by Vanguard.
At least: Under the statement on Reddit, Riot employees assure that the current problems are being worked on. Many players are also critical of Vanguard because of data protection, but here too they assure us that we don’t have to worry about the data collected by Vanguard. However, no further details are given.
