Rest easy, paranoid gamers. Riot Games says its Vanguard anti-cheat tool won’t “brick” the computers of hackers ruining everyone’s fun in its multiplayer games. And that’s too bad, since cheaters deserve to suffer at least twice as much as the beleaguered gamers that willingly subject themselves to grinding MMR in one of the company’s titles already do.

The brouhaha stems from a Vanguard update the “Valorant” and “League of Legends” maker released last week that targets notoriously hard to detect direct memory access (DMA) cheats, which bypass security measures by using an external device to write directly to a computer’s RAM.

Responding to another post about its new anti-cheat measure, the Riot social media account tweeted a picture of a bunch of rounded-up computer hardware that was reminiscent of a drug bust haul. It was appended with a provocative caption: “congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight.”

This turned out to be a PR landmine. The tongue-in-cheek post was interpreted as Riot bragging that it now had the ability to remotely brick your computer, creating an explosion of angry posts so overwhelming that the company scrambled to propitiate the mob banging on its gates.

“There’s been a wave of claims by cheaters about Vanguard ‘bricking’ their PCs, so let’s clear that up: Vanguard does not damage hardware or disable your devices,” it wrote in a lengthy X statement less than a day later.

“The photo we posted is a picture of cheat hardware devices that are sold explicitly for cheating in VALORANT (not normal PCs or PC components),” it added. “Through our latest updates, Vanguard now makes those devices worthless for VAL, but does not in any way brick PCs or PC components or PC software.”

The backlash is a reflection of how controversial Riot’s Vanguard software remains years after it was first released in 2020. A so-called kernel-level anti-cheat, it requires gaining the highest level of access to a part of the operating system where its most crucial processes run, a privilege that most software does not ask for. 

While this makes Vanguard adept at rooting out cheats running on someone’s system, it also in the eyes of critics makes it alarmingly invasive. And beyond potential privacy concerns, many users have complained that Vanguard causes all sorts of technical glitches on their machines, though it’s impossible to corroborate all those claims.

Unfortunately for Riot, those critiques aren’t about to die down after its latest DMA update and accompanying disastrous post. And unfortunately for the Vanguard-skeptical, Riot is sticking to its kernel-level guns.

“We’ll keep investing in anti-cheat to protect competitive integrity, and we’ll keep being as transparent as possible about how those systems work,” the company said in its statement.

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