Riot Games is changing how its Vanguard anti-cheat runs on PCs, pulling back from its always-on behavior and limiting when it's active on players' machines. With a new update, Vanguard will no longer automatically start when a PC boots – at least not for everyone. Instead, it can run only while a game is active and shuts down when play ends. That brings Riot in line with other kernel-level anti-cheat systems that typically run only while you're playing instead of staying in the background all the time.
Vanguard's behavior has been under scrutiny since it launched in 2020, so the change isn't a minor one. The software runs at the kernel level, giving it broad access to a system's inner workings. That access helps catch advanced cheats, but it also means Vanguard ran with elevated privileges and was constantly running. For some users, that combination has been a sticking point.
Riot is not abandoning that architecture, but it is changing how and when it's used. In announcing the update, Riot's anti-cheat chief Phillip Koskinas made clear the change only applies to PCs that meet specific security requirements.
"Starting later today, the universally beloved anti-cheat product, Vanguard, will begin to support on-demand sessions from all sufficiently secured PC devices," Koskinas sarcastically wrote.
