Whelp…I’m out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)
I may be preaching to the choir, but if the tradeoff you’re willing to make is to defend against cheats by installing a rootkit, that won’t even make cheating impossible as some kind of consolation, you should go back to the drawing board and try again.
Don’t get it twisted. We definitely agree.
This will effectively add any computer it’s installed on to a botnet and create another attack vector (via Vanguard).
The tradeoff I described, tho, is one on the Riot side. And as much as this form of anticheat is ridiculous, it makes sense given Riot’s business model. A bunch of cheaters can easily waste their money and engineering effort. They made the deliberate choice to narrow their market of potential players to those who are willing to install Vanguard and feel that Vanguard pushes most cheaters out of that narrow market. It makes sense.
Re: That tradeoff, tho, users aren’t involved. The tradeoff users have is between installing the game or not.
And again we both agree, installing this to an important computer or on your home network carries a tonne of risk.
In infosec it’s known that there is no impenetrable system. If someone wants the break in they will find a way to break in. Security is built around the idea of deterrence. Make it as annoying as possible so people thinking about breaking in would think it’s not worth the effort.
Same principle applies to cheating. Anyone really wanting to cheat will find a way to cheat. The purpose of anticheat isn’t to make cheating impossible, it’s to deter the low effort cheaters. If you had two identical games, but one doesn’t have anticheat then the game without the anticheat will have more cheaters.
In the same vein anticheat isn’t a magic bullet against cheating. There goes so much more into preventing cheating including specifically developing the game in a way that makes cheating harder.
In consumerism it’s known that there’s overreach, and I won’t buy their bullshit when a company has far too much control over my machine just because I want to play a video game.
Fighting games, as a genre, are already designed in such a way that reduces cheating. Every action you take makes you vulnerable, and cheats are usually built around automatic responses. Cheaters can often enough still lose just because the cheater wants to press buttons too and not let the computer do literally all of the work. Cheaters exist in games like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter, but they’re so rare and obvious that they become fodder for YouTube content.
