Is Vanguard Anti-Cheat bad for my PC? Riot Games responds to the accusations of it bricking PCs

After releasing a patch that finally added its Anti-Cheat software to League of Legends, developer Riot Games found themselves immersed in a bit of a controversy after reports started popping up about users whose PCs had been rendered inoperable by the company’s proprietary security program, claiming that its kernel-level operation had essentially “bricked” their computers after updating.

Vanguard, as the Riot anti-cheat software is called, was added to League of Legends as part of Patch 14.9, with promises that by adding it to the MOBA, it’s matches would be “free from scripters, botters, and cheaters!” But just as soon as it was released, users started claiming that the software affected their PCs. Multiple users posted on the game’s subreddit, showing off their now useless PCs. A few days after this started, Riot Games themselves posted a lengthy statement on the same subreddit addressing the situation.

“At this point in time, we have not confirmed any instances of Vanguard bricking anyone’s hardware, but we want to encourage anyone who’s having issues to contact Player Support so we can look into it and help out,” wrote a Riot spokesperson. “We’ve individually resolved a few of the major threads you may have seen so far of users claiming this with their machines and have confirmed that Vanguard wasn’t the cause of the issues they were facing.”

Alongside revealing that they’d personally contacted the users who claimed to have been affected by the update to help them figure out their PC problems, which led to them figuring out that Vanguard was in fact not the culprit in these situations, they also included some first response troubleshooting. Apparently, should users find themselves in a similar situation, they should look to enable UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) and TPM 2.0 straight from their computer’s BIOS to fix the issue.

Still, the post encourages players to keep an eye out for bugs when playing League of Legends and to immediately contact player support to report anything out of the ordinary, or to receive assistance should the need for it arise. Vanguard has actually been in operation in another of the company’s titles, Valorant, which launched back in 2020.