Riot Games denies Vanguard anti-cheat PC bricking claims

Riot Games recently had to publicly explain that their Vanguard anti-cheat cannot brick people’s PCs like the internet started panicking about.

All of this started when Riot Games posted a meme image with the caption “Congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight,” which many people interpreted as Vanguard literally destroying cheaters’ PCs.

The new Vanguard update targets DMA cheat devices and expensive hardware cheat setups that people use to bypass the anti-cheat system.
Riot Games says that Vanguard does not damage hardware, brick PCs, or destroy Windows, but instead only blocks certain cheat devices from working with Valorant and League of Legends.

But the drama started because Vanguard has kernel-level access, meaning it has very deep access to the system, which immediately made people go “WAIT, WHAT DO YOU MEAN PAPERWEIGHT???” especially because some cheaters were reporting crashes, boot problems, hardware instability, and even needing to reinstall Windows.

Community reactions are divided, because some people are happy that cheaters got affected and think Riot Games is based for this, while others believe kernel anti-cheat should never have this much control and still think it’s creepy how deeply Vanguard goes into the system.
That debate around Vanguard has been going on for years.

It turns out Riot Games probably was not destroying hardware, but rather the update activated security features that broke DMA cheat firmware because that firmware was extremely poorly made. So it’s more that the anti-cheat forced cheaters to sabotage themselves rather than Riot Games remotely bricking computers.

Riot Games claims that Vanguard cannot brick PCs, and that this update was made to kill DMA cheating.

But this entire drama once again opened the question of how much control kernel anti-cheat should actually have over a computer.