Riot says League of Legends Vanguard roll-out has ‘gone well,’ after some claimed it’s bricking PCs

Amid claims of League of Legend‘s new anti-cheat software bricking PCs, Riot Games has said everything’s actually working as intended, adding that only a small minority of players have reported anything going wrong.

In an effort to assuage any fears of the anti-cheat software, named Vanguard, League of Legends‘ senior anti-cheat analyst Matt ‘K30’ Paoletti took to Reddit to update fans on the situation. He stated that “the rollout has gone well,” with Riot already seeing a sharp drop in bot accounts. However, there have clearly been enough complaints about Vanguard’s implementation for Paoletti to directly address them.

For context, Riot recently rolled out Vanguard, the same anti-cheat it uses for Valorant, in League of Legends earlier this week. It didn’t take long for reports to come in from players saying the software had bricked their PCs. One LoL content creator, Nick “LS” De Cesare, was among those affected, with both of his PCs refusing to turn on after installing the update. He was eventually able to get one of them working again, but it required some technical wizardry on his part.

According to Paoletti, despite the widespread complaints, a very small amount of LoL players have reported issues with Vanguard; less than 0.03% of them, in fact. He also stated that most of the error codes players are experiencing can be easily resolved through simple troubleshooting, and that Riot’s yet to confirm any of these bricked PCs are a direct result of installing Vanguard. In addition, Paoletti denied suggestions that Vanguard is taking screenshots of players’ monitors, although it can “take a picture of your game client (in fullscreen) and the region your game client occupies (in windowed/borderless) for suspicious activity related to ESP hacks.”

The long and short of it is that if you’ve been experiencing technical issues with your computer following the update, then Riot’s Vanguard software has nothing to do with it. I can’t imagine those affected are wholly satisfied with that answer, especially since there’s a string of comments to the post that were deleted by a moderator, no doubt because they were deemed abusive. Further down the thread, other disgruntled players have said they’ve already uninstalled LoL. Whatever the cause, it’s clear this drama won’t be dying down any time soon.