Riot Games is making a big change to its Vanguard anti-cheat system: After an update set to go live today (and which may already be live by the time you read this) it will not launch when your PC boots up, but will instead will be “on demand,” meaning it will only run when playing a game and will shut down once the gameplay is over.
Vanguard was very controversial when it launched in 2020 because it’s “kernel mode” software that, in theory at least, grants Riot access to your PC at an alarmingly deep level. On top of that intrusiveness, it’s also effectively omnipresent: It launches when your PC does, and it runs quietly in the background, doing whatever, until you shut down.
Other games roll with kernel mode anti-cheat, like Genshin Impact, Doom Eternal, and Call of Duty games, but in those cases the anti-cheat only runs when the game is running, and terminates when the game does. Now, finally, Riot will give League of Legends and Valorant players the same option—with some conditions.
“Starting later today, the universally beloved anti-cheat product, Vanguard, will begin to support on-demand sessions from all sufficiently secured PC devices,” Riot’s anti-cheat chief Phillip Koskinas wrote in an update announcing the change.
“‘On-demand’ here means that Vanguard’s driver component will no longer launch when the system starts, but ‘secured’ indicates that this will be possible only if that system’s hardware has met a set of modern security requirements. By opting into pre-boot security mechanisms and Windows’ own native protection features, Vanguard can safely end its watch, and your taskbar can have 256 of its pixels back.”
Those “pre-boot security mechanisms” are the conditions in question, and for the vast majority of players it’s a matter of convenience rather than capability. Koskinas said that roughly 35% of Riot’s players already satisfy the conditions required for Vanguard’s new “Pre-Check, ” so the option to switch Vanguard into on-demand mode will appear automatically after the update goes live.
For just about everyone else, there’s more: You’ll need to be running Windows 11 25H2 or later, and have UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, VBS, HVCI, and IOMMU all switched on. If you want to know what all of that means, or what they do, the full update has the details; it gets technical, but you won’t need to get into the weeds to get it all set up. You will probably need to do a little dicking around in your BIOS, though, which may or may not sound like your idea of a good time.
I say “just about everyone else” because, according to the update, about 3% of Riot’s players are on older hardware that can’t meet the Pre-Check requirements—so for them, the on demand option simply won’t be available unless and until they upgrade. Vanguard will continue to operate as it is for the foreseeable future, however, so Riot said it’s not really an issue: “We’re not making anyone change anything. We’re willing to wait until the ecosystem matures.”
That also holds if you’re happy with Vanguard as it is (and if you’ve been playing Valorant or League or the past few years with no complaint, there’s a good chance you are) and don’t care about any of this: You can just ignore all of this, do nothing, and carry on as usual.
Koskinas said it’s taken this long to give Vanguard an on-demand option because it wasn’t until fairly recently that Windows and PC hardware had built-in security features sufficient to enable it.
“Microsoft and PC equipment manufacturers have long-recognized the need for cryptographic verification of boot processes and of the kernel, so they’ve been cookin’ up heat for quite some time,” he explained.
“The resulting oven-fresh security features require newer hardware components and newer versions of Windows, but through the power of collaboration and the combined might of our wills, we’ve worked directly with the inestimable Xbox OS Security Team at Microsoft to see improvements made natively to the Windows kernel that have finally afforded us the opportunity to offer an on-demand mode within the Vanguard product.”
Koskinas also said that as botting becomes increasingly complex and accessible with the advent of AI, Riot will continue to advance its own anti-cheat efforts. “That said, friction is not fun, and we prefer incentives to requirements,” he concluded. “For that reason, our trust segmentation will be surgical, and while we might add more checks to Pre-Check in the future, we plan on keeping things optional until you’re in the most competitive segments, on the strangest devices, or amongst the highest ranks.”
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