Is Riot's Anti-Cheat Really Bricking PCs?

Riot, the gaming giant behind "Valorant" and "League of Legends," clarified in a post on X that its Vanguard anti-cheat isn't bricking PCs. The rumors started circulating it shared a photo of various hardware devices on X, congratulating cheaters on their $6K paperweights in a response to a post outlining how the Vanguard update affected DMA firmware. As a result, the community quickly started debating whether Riot can actually destroy PCs.

Riot quickly squashed the rumors by confirming that Vanguard can't damage hardware or disable devices. The creators of "League of Legends" (which remains one of the best free games to this day) further clarified that the photo showed hardware devices sold for cheating in its game, "Valorant," which are now practically useless. In other words, the updated Vanguard anti-cheat software blocks cheat devices, so attempts to use them for their intended purpose could result in hardware issues.

According to Riot, the devices themselves remain functional after disabling security features like the IOMMU. Yet, since these are now a must for running Riot Games software, cheaters are forced to give up. The company further reiterated its commitment to protect the transparency and integrity of the games by investing in further anti-cheat protocols, assuring gamers that this only affects those using hardware cheating setups.

Of course, Riot isn't the first company to implement anti-cheating measures in its competitive games. For instance, the team behind "Call of Duty" once rolled out a system that made legitimate players invisible to cheaters. What Vanguard lacks in surface-level originality, it delivers in droves of sheer effectiveness. In fact, it's so potent that the system shunned 3.6 million cheaters within four years of being operational in "Valorant." Vanguard's kernel-mode driver is always running in the background and monitoring the system. At the same time, another client is there to spring into action when players fire up any Riot game.

However, cheaters always find a workaround. As a result, DMA cheats became very popular due to their ability to bypass software protections by implementing external hardware that can directly access memory. This is exactly why Riot forced the update on accounts that deployed DMA devices, and consequently why they made the "paperweight" comment.

In the end, the rumor of Riot's anti-cheat Vanguard software bricking PCs was simply a case of a misinterpreted joke. The company threw extra shade at cheaters, assuring them their DMA devices will continue working in other games. Riot went as far as to instruct them to disable IOMMU in BIOS to make the device cheat-ready again, but stressed they simply can't continue using the hardware for "Valorant" matches.