Riot Games‘ kernel-level anti-cheat, Vanguard, has received an update that is allegedly altering system firmware to remove the ability of the user to access certain hardware associated with cheating.
Riot Games quoted one post discussing the anti-cheat, replying “congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight.” But how exactly does Vanguard’s new system make “paperweights” out of hardware?
Shouldn’t that be insanely illegal? This is literally malware. Even if someone is outright hacking into your servers, you can’t just hack back and ruin their system. There’s a reason the legal side is not supposed to resort to illegal actions, the fuck.
I dunno’, that’s kinda exactly what “scammer payback” does. Though that’s slightly different than them ‘just’ hacking you.
Still agreed that doing it over a video game is just crazy.
Reckless behavior. Don’t trust a game company to exercise this extreme level of control over a device that you are supposed to own.
Just say no to kernel anti-cheat.
Yeah your game is so important that you get to destroy people’s hardware? Shit should be illegal.
A kernel level anticheat is basically spyware in all but name and stated benign purpose. This if true is getting on the malware territory. Like who is responsible on the case of false positives.
The ability to detect the firmware necessary for the cheats comes after collaboration between Riot and various motherboard manufacturers such as MSI, ASRock, and ASUS.
“Our games are so important that we need your help to break devices that your customers plug in to your products”
They sound quite smug now, let’s see when it inevitably triggers on someone’s legitimate hardware.
That’s definitely too heavy handed. It’s not uncommon for anti cheat to flag someone erroneously, and to just hand an executioner the ability to nuke your computer without any form of redress is asinine and anti consumer, if not criminal.
Yup, these systems have a history of false positives and flagging legitimate programs as cheating software and messing with a users system, using cheat software or not, to this extent is just absolutely wrong.
It’s a big reason for me why I stopped buying and playing these types of games.
On one side, I love how it breaks cheaters hardware, should not have cheated… eh?
On the other side, worried that it might and will break non-cheaters hardware sooner or later.
I think even breaking hardware that you know is only for cheating should still never be done. It’s a game, it does not matter that much. Hopefully this results in a lawsuit
seriously. surely they can fingerprint the offender’s PC and just ban both the account and the PC fingerprint.
You know the later will happen so frequently that it barely makes up benefits of the former.
