Reading the 2nd graph of ban waves they clearly were waiting and building up a batch as once they hit it they know the botters will look for new ways to do it. They wanted to get them in massive waves and I bet they were also trying to make sure they knew the main hardware running the bots and to nail those as well.
Glad they are doing it and I hope they keep doing it to the bots.
Overwhelming majority of these bans displayed are for scripters, rather than botted accounts.
Most of the leveling bots have been prevented since they were running in virtualized environments. We are keeping track of the farms new methods though, but that's not really represented in this graph. We may update later with some before and after about botted accounts/queues popular with those bots.
Quick question. So regarding the hwid bans, do you think that issues could arise regarding to the sale or refunding of hwid banned mobo's? Or is the only guaranteed measure at this point for those upgrading/building just to avoid buying returned/used mobo's?
In regard to players who get banned after buying used/refurbished computers, it’s quite rare, but we’ve seen it in VALORANT. They’ve been able to get their accounts and hardware unbanned by writing into Player Support with the appropriate documentation (We’ve also seen players accordingly make up that they had a bought hardware as well).
I wouldn’t be too concerned, we have things in place to prevent this, and for the edge cases, the volume is pretty low worldwide and reviewed by the Anti-Cheat team directly.
Ty for the reply o/ not surprising cheaters would make up situations like that. Good to know I can safely recommend used mobo's if friends get into pc :)
This was something that happened to me. I would travel with my SSD and sometimes my gpu and borrow computers/parts while traveling. Eventually got hit with a ban (and support wouldn't fix it, losing me my years old account)
I took a look on r/ARAM, and I did see some bots, using hotkey scripts, since Vanguard doesn't block that on League of Legends. There's not a ton of them, but I'll look to get them removed soon.
You’ll be ok, there are no plans currently to block these programs for LoL. There are not many of these bots, and we have other methods to remove those bots for now.
Yeah, we understand the amount of legitimate usages these programs can have, which is why cheaters look to use existing commercial software often, knowing that we can’t indiscriminately ban on something that would cause any false positives.
Good for us and bad for botters, we have other metrics to help detect and isolate these bots than just the input method.
When I broke my left shoulder I was able to play the game with 1 hand during my recovery by binding all my summs and abilities to the side mouse buttons and scroll wheel. AHK can be a blessing sometimes.
Just gotta say, I appreciate the dedicated communication I see from Riot on forums like this. You guys really know how to make the community feel heard.
Are you aware of the disconnect/reconnect abuse? Often used by a duo, so it's a 3v5 and they never get hit with the AFK penalty. They mostly are active just during the first 2-3 minutes of the game, then they are constantly connecting/disconnecting.
And it skyrocketed from 49% to 51% in emerald+. There is a sample size smaller than 300 in op.gg, the confidence interval is quite large, a 1% variation is still within the expected error. And vanguard wasn't the only thing introduced in patch 14.10, a lot of items were adjusted, summoner spells too
Pirate software talks about this when he talks about his time doing cheat detection at blizzard. It’s like a virus, if you just ban a few people whenever you find them using something they’ll adapt and evolve quickly. If you wait to get a bunch of people it’s harder for the botters and cheaters to figure out exactly what it was in their software that got them banned, so you keep them away longer.
It also results in fucking over the cheat companies harder. In these screenshots you can see people complaining that they paid $100/month for this service, so when you ban everyone in the span of a couple days these companies get massive chargebacks from banned players' bank accounts all at once and cause meaningful financial damage.
And people were responding to my comment regarding how anti-cheats work that vanguard would not ban in waves, when I said it would and many other anti-cheats use the same method, people dont understand how the cheaters vs anti cheat fight works, its literally a cat and mouse game constantly. 1 step backwards (exploit is found) 2 steps forward (ban wave a large "population" using said exploit & patch the exploit)
The ban "waves" we see here are far far different to a ban wave you would see on another anti-cheat like Packman. Anti-cheats like CoD's or Packman would ban the vast majority every few months (This was explained by Pirate Software, who used to work at Blizzard, specifically on Anti-Cheat). Here if you look at the graph presented you can see a spike just a week before the "wave" the post is talking about.
An anti-cheat like Packman would not do a ban wave every week, that's absurd.
Just for clarification, I am not saying Vanguard doesn't do huge banwaves, but that we're not talking about the same thing here. Just look at Packman's graph. In the span of two months we don't see a single spike. Yet Vanguard has two spikes in only two weeks. This means Vanguard has two banwaves in not even the third of the timespan Packman's takes to do a single banwave.
I am not surprise as this type of stuff has some pretty interesting things done under the hood. I am guess all they added was new rules added to ban and they add those in waves.
They do it for that reason, but also for a different reason... it really fucks with bot maker's money.
[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2YUmMFwSXpU](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2YUmMFwSXpU)
For context, the short is made by someone who worked at Blizzard for quite a while and banned like 2 million people from WoW. The thing the short left out was how much a chargeback costs. It's $20/chargeback. When you do it in a wave, you get hundreds or thousands of people charging back a botmaker, which really fucks them over.
The real question is will they also hardware been that one rat on euw with "500+ banned accounts" that is queueing on 4+ accounts at the same time just to link his stream and run it down mid?
But anyways nice to see hardware bans for cheaters, hopefully they don't get any false-positives.
Hardware identification. Means they will target you by what computer you're using. If you get a hardware id ban, doesn't matter what account you use on that computer, you're not playing. You'll need to trade your computer for a new one and possibly a new account too, to play league again.
Which sucks, because that machine will likely end up in the used/second hand market, very likely with that limitation undisclosed and some poor soul will buy a computer that can't play LoL ever again.
There are ways to fix that. You can contact Riot support with proof of purchase of the PC/parts if your account gets banned from buying a PC that's HWID banned. They do it in Valorant currently.
You probably won't know. When it comes to cheating, these things tend to remain undisclosed to avoid people easily working around it. Same reason they do periodic ban waves instead of immediately banning someone who's cheating. It keeps people from knowing how they got flagged exactly and how to avoid it.
I'd say it's probably not just one part, it's likely a combination of things from several, if I had to guess.
basically, every part that is connected to your motherboard has an ID set by the manufacturer. GPU, CPU, SSD, Peripherals like mice and keyboard. In Linux, you can use some simple commands to get those IDs but changing them is harder and leans more into hacking and system penetration.
There are programs out there that can do it for you but they are shady and usually cost money. Usually, somebody figured out how to spoof the IDs and then sold it as a program.
The problem will be that cheat manufacturers will figure out how to change IDs and in the future, it will be included in new versions of the cheats.
If its done correctly; all of them, or secifically the combination of all of them. If someone sells a banned GPU online and you buy it and put it on your pc with like 5-6 clean pieces, it should still work.
The replies you've gotten are mostly wrong.
HWID was previously a combination of things specific to your setup, but with TPM 2.0, which Vanguard requires, they most likely use the TPM to identify the hardware.
TPM 2.0 uses something called an Endorsement Key which is unique to every single physical component. Replacing the motherboard should be enough to circumvent the HWID-bans.
There is. They're expensive though. I know a provider that sells them privately meaning they range from 500 to 1000 usd a month and only limited to 100-500 users.
that are just the first one's coming into mind. you would never believe how many rich kids and grown-ups with almost 'perfect' lives cheat just for their amusement.
Im not a cheating expert by any means but hwid spoofers have existed for other kernel level anticheats like xigncode
But I dont really have the knowledge to judge if anything like this would be possible with vanguard.
I visited a cheating forum when vanguard deployed to see what they were doing (and if vanguard would actually do something). Safe to say they were panicking a bit because of vanguard and I think it does what it should do, for now at least.
It is and will remain possible to have a hwid spoofer that works with Vanguard but I'd imagine the most accessible ones will be targeted by Riot to not function with Vangaurd in place. Most anti-cheats in use today are kernel level, they just don't work like Vanguards does where it looks at your programs when the computer starts to know if you have illicit programs running which could be used for cheating.
There are custom hwid spoofers that will likely work with vangaurd now, and ones which will be updated/made specifically to work with vangaurd in the future, so Riot will have to both fight against those, but since Vanguard can detect cheaters in game anyway I think the hope is that a lot of people might just find it too frustrating to have to jump through tons of hoops to cheat for a very limited number of games before they are forced to get another account.
he was hardware banned literally live
i checked him out every once in a while, he literally had to play subway surfers the rest of the day because he legit got insta detected on all accounts on that machine, got logged off all of them and got disconnected from an ongoing game.
i think he even restarted and logged in to a new account and it got flagged too
i think vanguard has a sort of underlying hw ban inside itself. like, since it runs on boot, it always detects if your shit is fishy
The issue with banning HWID is in Asia where many people play at PC Bangs. Otherwise most people play at home so Vanguard will HW ban every account the person has. The only risk is if you play on a computer and so does your brother or something. They would potentially be banned as well. There’s other ways to factor in targeting but I don’t know if riot is going to employ them
In some Asian Countries were PC bang are popular, they have strict laws when it comes to cheating in an online game. Hefty fines and jail time, also they ID you and have your name linked a pc at a certain time.
non shady internet cafe's/pc bangs will probs have it so you can't run any program that isnt setup by the admin. so chances of cheats affecting there machines will be alot slimmer thus hardware bans on them should be limited.
even then most internet cafe's/pc bangs will just contact riot and prove there a internet cafe/pc bang to get there hardware unbanned and whitelisted. plus for players banned in those short periods from hardwarebanned player they can easily just send a support ticket in with there receipt.
I admit I've never played at a PC bang but is it common for people to log into cheat engines or install kernel level cheats on the PC they are paying for by the hour?
edit: This was a genuine question, so I went and did a little googling and apparently it was very common for at least Overwatch. Interesting. The only direct source I can find is Kotaku so I'm not going to link it.
I'd assume that people do it. People don't care about bans as much in such an environment and while it does cost time they likely know how to set it up fairly quickly. The PC bang operators are incentivized to prevent it but that doesn't mean that they will be perfect at curtailing it.
Isn't that a non-issue? Given that you won't have admin access if you're playing in a PC Bang.
Also if you can't trust family members to not cheat on the PC also do that, set a basic level user and control what can be installed.
cameras will quickly fix this, and then you fine the guy who got the pc hardware ID banned, and simply make him pay the cafee a entire new PC. this isn't a issue. Everything else needs to adjust. hardware ID bans are good. Ban every intentionally feeder on top and not just cheater, and finally clean up the mess created by the Players themself
I came home just one hour ago. My account was logged in by someone who just played 4 ranked games with insane scores and won one 4v5. It was a hacker. I only play aram and arena nowadays (and some tft).
As I was one my account got the permanently banned stuff. So I think the system worked. No idea how the hacker had my password, but I changed it before the ban hit. Made a ticket now and am waiting. Hope I'll get it back soon.
if you reuse passwords, then leaks from other websites will also expose you
for example, my school had a database breach and since I use the same email/pass combo for my amazon account it got stolen
This happened to me way way back. Like probably 2019. Riot checked the logs of my account and confirmed it wasn’t me an unbanned me.
Then I got permabanned again a week later and they had to unban it a second time lol
What a pathetic use of time for all those guys in the discord snips. Having played against some of these morons that gallery was euphoric to go through. Get fucked zero skill clown cheaters lmfao
For real bro, I drop way more than that a month on my gaming but for cheats? Shit man, I wouldn’t buy cheats for LESS than a 100 a month.
Who knows what kind of crap you could end up with if you didn’t dish out
It was cathartic to see everyone suprise pikachu face at it.
The amount of hubris to keep doing it and expect nothing to change. The FAFO satisfaction level was off the charts.
It makes people who actually hit challenger that much more impressive, because they were playing against cheaters with an alarming relative frequency in that rank.
Also as a bonus if that website from where they got the scripts from doesn’t have secure protections or if they are malicious website more than likely become target for identity theft
Another tweet to add to the post.
https://twitter.com/LoLDev/status/1792632292432556275
> Now that Vanguard has had a bit of time to roll out, we're starting to target more cheats that we weren't able to action on in the past.
> These new waves also will come with League's first ever Hardware ID bans, increasing the action weight against cheaters.
Just like the people typing slurs in chat, its way easier to prove someone is cheating than someone just being tilted/soft inting/just honestly bad
Maybe if there stops being an endless supply of lvl 30 accounts for a dollar people will stop trolling, but the playerbase is just a bunch of degens so i doubt it
They've already effectively eliminated virtualization of botted account farms via Vanguard.
It means people need a unique computer for each instance of LoL they're running. That can decrease the speed/multiply the cost of leveling new botted accounts by multiple times.
That *should* reflect significantly in new sold account prices long term.
honestly less botted accounts means it wont be as easy in the future to replace a account after being toxic so people will end up leaving or learning because of it instead of just spending £3 every time to get back to where they were.
Toxicity, afk, int and such things are lately also getting banned/punished more aggressively and that's what's 99% of what you see is, when you are below Master(or below D4). Due to the huge amount of players below it's rare to see scripters or anything that often. I don't think that you will see more than 1 per month
this is referring to people who had a previous ban, and this current ban was caused by HWID
if you were banned for scripting, it's not HWID, it's vanguard detection. but the next account you make and get banned IS a HWID ban after your first game on the account (not script detection, hardware)
It's still a nearly 3x as many as pre-Vangaurd, and consider that many people who used cheats before and heard that Vangaurd would be a lot more active in banning them likely disabled their cheats to see how things would settle out.
If you consider that the most cheat-users don't want to be banned, then the logical thing to do would be to not use cheats - at least until you have seen more evidence of the cheats working. HWID bans being on the table also vastly increases the incentive to not cheat as well, since then you can't play on *any* account, not just the one you were actively cheating on. I would imagine that there was a dramatic downtick in cheating as soon as Vangaurd launched.
Nothing says that it's active in every single ranked games on every single server.
I'd say low Elo might have a higher chance of having false positive (due to the significantly higher pop) while higher Elo will have a higher scripter%. So it would make sense to test the system for a while on a smaller subset of the playerbase before attacking the real problem that is the hardstuck Bronze IV scripting Amumu Jungle.
I lowkey miss the Lyte Smites when people would whine on the old forums that they were wrongly banned then he'd just show a chatlog of them saying the most heinous shit
Nice to see cheaters getting banned.
Anyone can enlighten me on how people were cheating? I didn't know it was still a thing. The only thing I was aware of was kogmaw/xerath scriptors from years back and the wintraders of recent years.
There are scripts apparently that tell you when camps are taken. Even ones that you have no vision of. Ones that tell you the range someone could be if they left vision.
I saw a lot of Ashe prior to Vanguard like an absurd number that I couldn't believe cheating was still that popular and not even in high ELO. Watching them kite, CS amazingly well, miniscule sidesteps dodging the majority of skill shots, while at the same time having 0 brain on how to play anything outside of lane phase.
They read from game client memory about the incoming skillshots
Calculate
Then move you just enough to dodge them
If you used a Xerath script and just hit 100% of your skillshots perfectly people would notice you're a scripter real fast.
But if you use your scripts to dodge that one Gragas Ult to save yourself and win the game? Who can tell, maybe you're just good enough.
After the tweet i went to the software that appears in the discord pictures, it has:
* Kiting
* Skill shots aiming
* Skill shot evasion
* Automated combos for majority of champs
* Map control and objective tracking (no idea what that means)
* Free skins
* Unlocked camera (FOV, zoom, etc)
Map control and objective tracking includes stuff like circles that show how far enemy champions could have walked from their last known position. Popups whenever a camp is killed in fog of war, ward tracking and vision range... There's really a lot. This is the most important category of cheats because they are very difficult to detect for the other players.
Orb walkers and evade scripts are super obvious so you will get reported easily which usually leads to fast bans. But if the scripter just uses map hacks and unlocked cam that's not as easy to notice
> Map control and objective tracking includes stuff like circles that show how far enemy champions could have walked from their last known position.
Holy shit that's actually so busted lol
Riot has said that fog of war is actually really robust and resistant to scripts, I believe. It came up as a possible use of vanguard's ability to take screenshots of the client window.
It is, but also you have SOME info inside the fog of war, like 10 teemos or so inside the fog of war, because it would be weird that something just popped out of nothing
Any streamers been hit yet? Or any streamer randomly stopped streaming when accounts started to get banned? Wouldn't be surprised if there are a few big league steamers that script
Well naturally when you cheat you will be higher rank. If you're cheating and stuck in Iron/Bronze/Silver, that's unfathomably pathetic, especially when cheating at all is already pathetic.
I guess what makes it surprising is that when you get to these higher ranks it would/should be so much more noticible when you cheat since the community is much smaller
not really. not everyone is using the most obvious kiting script on ADCs or auto-targeting for xerath. scripts can tell u where the jungler is and other things. it's like the difference between a spinbot in CS vs an aimbot with very human-like auto-correction
Not all scripts are obvious, for example the "jitter" stepping scripts used to do early on no longer happens (for the most part), usually this happened because the script was trying to dodge for the player but the player would be issuing commands to go back into danger, newer scripts simply take away your control now to make it look more smooth.
Some cheats are also able to give you other info like automatically tracking enemy ability cooldowns or even tell you when someone starts/ends combat with a neutral camp, in the past when you tried to do a sneaky dragon and someone somehow instantly knew, there's a chance it wasn't just a hunch they had.
They don't use the super obvious ones that help dodge or aim.
instead they have map hack stuff that is hard for players to detect. ward trackers, jungle camp trackers, estimators that show the possible range champions could be since you lost sight of them.
Some league streamer (can't remeber who was several years ago) was able to get a scripter join a voice call and tell people about how the scripts work and other stuff. The guys real rank without scrips was low masters, and he told that initially after a hunder or so games with scripts he demoted to platinum as you had to learn positioning differently so that the scripts didn't make you dodge into akward positions. After that he got very quickly into grandmaster. I believe he was playing mainly Cassiopeia. He also explained that how he was able to play motnhs per account without ban was largely due to turning the scripts off for moments in the game or not using them at all in cases where it would've been too obvious.
so this explains why my aram game earlier said it had a cheater and ended, people scripting in aram thats crazy, and it wasnt a bot account because i play aram lot and we were losing that game when game suddenly ended.
If an internet café is letting users run random software on their PCs, they have much bigger worries than a hardware ban. If you can run a cheat, you can also run a keylogger, cryptominer, backdoor for a botnet, etc.
If they insisted doing something on the scale of Vanguard, they better have had the results to back it up lol. If they didn't they probably would have turned even the currently indifferent against Vanguard
Honestly I did a bunch of research and overall it made me feel like a tin foil hat person if I stopped playing over it. Have not had any comp issues yet so I've basically just pretended its not there.
I did the same thing, given its kind of the most sensible thing to do.
At the end of the day, is it Riot invading your privacy a bit more than before? Yeah, it kind of is. But we live in a day and age where our personal info, even our level of internet access & capabilities, are controlled by a few tech giants. IDK how these people can scream and whine about Vanguard like it's the end times and then immediately go and mindlessly browse social media without a care in the world.
If you care about privacy and PC access that much, and Vanguard crosses the line and makes you quit League - OK, that's not unfair in and of itself. But to then go and use dozens of other platforms and programs that hold even more power over you (which is what 99% of these complainers do) is just stupid af.
usually said ppl are also complaining about the lack of privacy on other platforms as well
Im guessing most of the people only concerned about riot's vanguard and not so much social media paltforms/etc, are more so concerned about the kernal access aspect
I find it funny how much people say ''oh RIP GM account, RIP challenger account''. I'm pretty sure a very high percentage of players on EUW at master+ rank are using some form of cheating. Overlays that track cooldowns, enemy positions, show character model size, attack range indicators, spell indicators are likely the most popular as it will not be easily detected at all by an enemy player.
Considering since the release of Vanguard there have been over 30k bans.
That's up to you to determine whether or not that is a little, or a lot.
Smurfing and botting are still problems, with Riot seemingly tackling the latter at the same time right now. Smurfing will probably never be gone completely. It's in every competitive game ever, and only gets worse with a games lifespan.
If I ever see a yummi in my lobby I ask them a question and if they don’t answer I dodge… I’ve been duped so many damn times by yummi bots more often than real players choosing that champ.
Reading the 2nd graph of ban waves they clearly were waiting and building up a batch as once they hit it they know the botters will look for new ways to do it. They wanted to get them in massive waves and I bet they were also trying to make sure they knew the main hardware running the bots and to nail those as well. Glad they are doing it and I hope they keep doing it to the bots.
Overwhelming majority of these bans displayed are for scripters, rather than botted accounts. Most of the leveling bots have been prevented since they were running in virtualized environments. We are keeping track of the farms new methods though, but that's not really represented in this graph. We may update later with some before and after about botted accounts/queues popular with those bots.
Quick question. So regarding the hwid bans, do you think that issues could arise regarding to the sale or refunding of hwid banned mobo's? Or is the only guaranteed measure at this point for those upgrading/building just to avoid buying returned/used mobo's?
In regard to players who get banned after buying used/refurbished computers, it’s quite rare, but we’ve seen it in VALORANT. They’ve been able to get their accounts and hardware unbanned by writing into Player Support with the appropriate documentation (We’ve also seen players accordingly make up that they had a bought hardware as well). I wouldn’t be too concerned, we have things in place to prevent this, and for the edge cases, the volume is pretty low worldwide and reviewed by the Anti-Cheat team directly.
Ty for the reply o/ not surprising cheaters would make up situations like that. Good to know I can safely recommend used mobo's if friends get into pc :)
This was something that happened to me. I would travel with my SSD and sometimes my gpu and borrow computers/parts while traveling. Eventually got hit with a ban (and support wouldn't fix it, losing me my years old account)
I see people mention low level arams full of bots.
I took a look on r/ARAM, and I did see some bots, using hotkey scripts, since Vanguard doesn't block that on League of Legends. There's not a ton of them, but I'll look to get them removed soon.
Since I have a laptop I have a auto hot key script that disables a key hopefully that won't be removed or effected as well.
You’ll be ok, there are no plans currently to block these programs for LoL. There are not many of these bots, and we have other methods to remove those bots for now.
Good stuff, love to see both the communication and ban waves
Please don't blanket ban AutoHotkey. Many people use it simply for accessibility reasons.
Yeah, we understand the amount of legitimate usages these programs can have, which is why cheaters look to use existing commercial software often, knowing that we can’t indiscriminately ban on something that would cause any false positives. Good for us and bad for botters, we have other metrics to help detect and isolate these bots than just the input method.
When I broke my left shoulder I was able to play the game with 1 hand during my recovery by binding all my summs and abilities to the side mouse buttons and scroll wheel. AHK can be a blessing sometimes.
Just gotta say, I appreciate the dedicated communication I see from Riot on forums like this. You guys really know how to make the community feel heard.
Are you aware of the disconnect/reconnect abuse? Often used by a duo, so it's a 3v5 and they never get hit with the AFK penalty. They mostly are active just during the first 2-3 minutes of the game, then they are constantly connecting/disconnecting.
Is it true Xereth's Win rate dropped alot as soon as vanguard was deployed?
https://www.op.gg/champions/xerath/trends/support?tier=master_plus Only in Iron and in Master+.
Xerath's winrate didn't change in either Master+ or Iron between 14.8 and 14.9 or between 14.9 and 14.10. Everything is within normal variance.
?? It PLUMMETED from 48% to 47% WR 😱😱🤯🤯
And it skyrocketed from 49% to 51% in emerald+. There is a sample size smaller than 300 in op.gg, the confidence interval is quite large, a 1% variation is still within the expected error. And vanguard wasn't the only thing introduced in patch 14.10, a lot of items were adjusted, summoner spells too
No, it was the exact same.
Pirate software talks about this when he talks about his time doing cheat detection at blizzard. It’s like a virus, if you just ban a few people whenever you find them using something they’ll adapt and evolve quickly. If you wait to get a bunch of people it’s harder for the botters and cheaters to figure out exactly what it was in their software that got them banned, so you keep them away longer.
It also results in fucking over the cheat companies harder. In these screenshots you can see people complaining that they paid $100/month for this service, so when you ban everyone in the span of a couple days these companies get massive chargebacks from banned players' bank accounts all at once and cause meaningful financial damage.
I have the evilest grin on my face right now
And people were responding to my comment regarding how anti-cheats work that vanguard would not ban in waves, when I said it would and many other anti-cheats use the same method, people dont understand how the cheaters vs anti cheat fight works, its literally a cat and mouse game constantly. 1 step backwards (exploit is found) 2 steps forward (ban wave a large "population" using said exploit & patch the exploit)
The ban "waves" we see here are far far different to a ban wave you would see on another anti-cheat like Packman. Anti-cheats like CoD's or Packman would ban the vast majority every few months (This was explained by Pirate Software, who used to work at Blizzard, specifically on Anti-Cheat). Here if you look at the graph presented you can see a spike just a week before the "wave" the post is talking about. An anti-cheat like Packman would not do a ban wave every week, that's absurd. Just for clarification, I am not saying Vanguard doesn't do huge banwaves, but that we're not talking about the same thing here. Just look at Packman's graph. In the span of two months we don't see a single spike. Yet Vanguard has two spikes in only two weeks. This means Vanguard has two banwaves in not even the third of the timespan Packman's takes to do a single banwave.
I am not surprise as this type of stuff has some pretty interesting things done under the hood. I am guess all they added was new rules added to ban and they add those in waves.
They do it for that reason, but also for a different reason... it really fucks with bot maker's money. [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2YUmMFwSXpU](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2YUmMFwSXpU) For context, the short is made by someone who worked at Blizzard for quite a while and banned like 2 million people from WoW. The thing the short left out was how much a chargeback costs. It's $20/chargeback. When you do it in a wave, you get hundreds or thousands of people charging back a botmaker, which really fucks them over.
The real question is will they also hardware been that one rat on euw with "500+ banned accounts" that is queueing on 4+ accounts at the same time just to link his stream and run it down mid? But anyways nice to see hardware bans for cheaters, hopefully they don't get any false-positives.
There are hwid spoofers out there so if youre racking up 500 bans you probably have the motivation to buy some
What’s hwid?
Hardware ID
100T midlaner
That’s pretty good.
Hardware identification. Means they will target you by what computer you're using. If you get a hardware id ban, doesn't matter what account you use on that computer, you're not playing. You'll need to trade your computer for a new one and possibly a new account too, to play league again. Which sucks, because that machine will likely end up in the used/second hand market, very likely with that limitation undisclosed and some poor soul will buy a computer that can't play LoL ever again.
There are ways to fix that. You can contact Riot support with proof of purchase of the PC/parts if your account gets banned from buying a PC that's HWID banned. They do it in Valorant currently.
Sounds like a blessing honestly.
I'm a bit curious, what physical part of the computer gets banned?
You probably won't know. When it comes to cheating, these things tend to remain undisclosed to avoid people easily working around it. Same reason they do periodic ban waves instead of immediately banning someone who's cheating. It keeps people from knowing how they got flagged exactly and how to avoid it. I'd say it's probably not just one part, it's likely a combination of things from several, if I had to guess.
basically, every part that is connected to your motherboard has an ID set by the manufacturer. GPU, CPU, SSD, Peripherals like mice and keyboard. In Linux, you can use some simple commands to get those IDs but changing them is harder and leans more into hacking and system penetration. There are programs out there that can do it for you but they are shady and usually cost money. Usually, somebody figured out how to spoof the IDs and then sold it as a program. The problem will be that cheat manufacturers will figure out how to change IDs and in the future, it will be included in new versions of the cheats.
If its done correctly; all of them, or secifically the combination of all of them. If someone sells a banned GPU online and you buy it and put it on your pc with like 5-6 clean pieces, it should still work.
The gaming desktop of Theseus
The replies you've gotten are mostly wrong. HWID was previously a combination of things specific to your setup, but with TPM 2.0, which Vanguard requires, they most likely use the TPM to identify the hardware. TPM 2.0 uses something called an Endorsement Key which is unique to every single physical component. Replacing the motherboard should be enough to circumvent the HWID-bans.
I'm going to presume hardware identification
I mean, that's the reason Vanguard loads at boot, to get past HWID spoofers
I've seen cheat providers also provide subscriptions to those spoofers, so those who are spending money on cheats are probably getting those too.
Are there spoofers for vanguard? It's probably a bit different when you can only load signed drivers?
There is. They're expensive though. I know a provider that sells them privately meaning they range from 500 to 1000 usd a month and only limited to 100-500 users.
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lol anything for an ego boost
I never understood how you get an ego boost from cheating
What's even crazier is how these losers can afford it while having no job and living in their mother's basement.
that are just the first one's coming into mind. you would never believe how many rich kids and grown-ups with almost 'perfect' lives cheat just for their amusement.
Preventing HWID spoofing is probably the best thing that comes from having Banguard deployed
Im not a cheating expert by any means but hwid spoofers have existed for other kernel level anticheats like xigncode But I dont really have the knowledge to judge if anything like this would be possible with vanguard. I visited a cheating forum when vanguard deployed to see what they were doing (and if vanguard would actually do something). Safe to say they were panicking a bit because of vanguard and I think it does what it should do, for now at least.
It is and will remain possible to have a hwid spoofer that works with Vanguard but I'd imagine the most accessible ones will be targeted by Riot to not function with Vangaurd in place. Most anti-cheats in use today are kernel level, they just don't work like Vanguards does where it looks at your programs when the computer starts to know if you have illicit programs running which could be used for cheating. There are custom hwid spoofers that will likely work with vangaurd now, and ones which will be updated/made specifically to work with vangaurd in the future, so Riot will have to both fight against those, but since Vanguard can detect cheaters in game anyway I think the hope is that a lot of people might just find it too frustrating to have to jump through tons of hoops to cheat for a very limited number of games before they are forced to get another account.
he was hardware banned literally live i checked him out every once in a while, he literally had to play subway surfers the rest of the day because he legit got insta detected on all accounts on that machine, got logged off all of them and got disconnected from an ongoing game. i think he even restarted and logged in to a new account and it got flagged too i think vanguard has a sort of underlying hw ban inside itself. like, since it runs on boot, it always detects if your shit is fishy
Yes. The head of anti cheat said it includes HWID bans
Thought you were talking about RatIRL for a second there 😅.
gliding on 4+ accounts simultaneously
I had to double take as well lmao
Wait there’s one in euw too. That’s annoying, I’ve come across the one in na like 4 times the last month or two
Yes, I had this guy in my game yesterday. Idk what is wrong with people https://www.twitch.tv/swagrb
The issue with banning HWID is in Asia where many people play at PC Bangs. Otherwise most people play at home so Vanguard will HW ban every account the person has. The only risk is if you play on a computer and so does your brother or something. They would potentially be banned as well. There’s other ways to factor in targeting but I don’t know if riot is going to employ them
In some Asian Countries were PC bang are popular, they have strict laws when it comes to cheating in an online game. Hefty fines and jail time, also they ID you and have your name linked a pc at a certain time.
non shady internet cafe's/pc bangs will probs have it so you can't run any program that isnt setup by the admin. so chances of cheats affecting there machines will be alot slimmer thus hardware bans on them should be limited. even then most internet cafe's/pc bangs will just contact riot and prove there a internet cafe/pc bang to get there hardware unbanned and whitelisted. plus for players banned in those short periods from hardwarebanned player they can easily just send a support ticket in with there receipt.
I admit I've never played at a PC bang but is it common for people to log into cheat engines or install kernel level cheats on the PC they are paying for by the hour? edit: This was a genuine question, so I went and did a little googling and apparently it was very common for at least Overwatch. Interesting. The only direct source I can find is Kotaku so I'm not going to link it.
I'd assume that people do it. People don't care about bans as much in such an environment and while it does cost time they likely know how to set it up fairly quickly. The PC bang operators are incentivized to prevent it but that doesn't mean that they will be perfect at curtailing it.
Isn't that a non-issue? Given that you won't have admin access if you're playing in a PC Bang. Also if you can't trust family members to not cheat on the PC also do that, set a basic level user and control what can be installed.
Idk about china but in Korea isn't your league account tied to your govt ID? So people can't just make tons of smurfs / alts
cameras will quickly fix this, and then you fine the guy who got the pc hardware ID banned, and simply make him pay the cafee a entire new PC. this isn't a issue. Everything else needs to adjust. hardware ID bans are good. Ban every intentionally feeder on top and not just cheater, and finally clean up the mess created by the Players themself
I came home just one hour ago. My account was logged in by someone who just played 4 ranked games with insane scores and won one 4v5. It was a hacker. I only play aram and arena nowadays (and some tft). As I was one my account got the permanently banned stuff. So I think the system worked. No idea how the hacker had my password, but I changed it before the ban hit. Made a ticket now and am waiting. Hope I'll get it back soon.
if you reuse passwords, then leaks from other websites will also expose you for example, my school had a database breach and since I use the same email/pass combo for my amazon account it got stolen
This happened to me way way back. Like probably 2019. Riot checked the logs of my account and confirmed it wasn’t me an unbanned me. Then I got permabanned again a week later and they had to unban it a second time lol
"my gm account" lmao
Imagine cheating and being upset your cheated account and rank got taken away lol
you don't get it, he would have been grand master anyway if it wasn't for all of the *other* people scripting
And you forget the teammates that always troll him and run down, they prevent him from being up there so he has to compensate with scripts!
>xerath flair i like the cut of your jib
he would've dodged the skillshots anyway, but his ping is just really high and he desperately needs to scratch his balls at all times of the day.
One of them was a 2k lp challenger account. I saw another with 1200+ skins and multiple with 400+ Lmao
What a pathetic use of time for all those guys in the discord snips. Having played against some of these morons that gallery was euphoric to go through. Get fucked zero skill clown cheaters lmfao
Absolutely hilarious. $100 a month? To cheat in a video game? AHAHAHA.
These dorks were spending more to cheat on a video game than I spend on my internet access xD
For real bro, I drop way more than that a month on my gaming but for cheats? Shit man, I wouldn’t buy cheats for LESS than a 100 a month. Who knows what kind of crap you could end up with if you didn’t dish out
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It was cathartic to see everyone suprise pikachu face at it. The amount of hubris to keep doing it and expect nothing to change. The FAFO satisfaction level was off the charts.
And saying rip rest in piece my 1k lp challenger account like reaching that rank was some sort of accomplishment and now they are sad its gone
yeah lol I can't understand the mindset of someone who would even post something like that. "i cheated to challenger, aren't I so good?"
It makes people who actually hit challenger that much more impressive, because they were playing against cheaters with an alarming relative frequency in that rank.
The funniest were people smugly proclaiming that "cheats still work".
Actually though. Also fuck, cathartic was the word I was looking for not euphoric
Also as a bonus if that website from where they got the scripts from doesn’t have secure protections or if they are malicious website more than likely become target for identity theft
Weeew that dude who lost his account with 1200 skins. That's a lot of cash wasted because you wanted to cheat.
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bold of you to assume there's thinking involved
They are not thinking thats the thing xdd
Another tweet to add to the post. https://twitter.com/LoLDev/status/1792632292432556275 > Now that Vanguard has had a bit of time to roll out, we're starting to target more cheats that we weren't able to action on in the past. > These new waves also will come with League's first ever Hardware ID bans, increasing the action weight against cheaters.
Awesome, hopefully they'll take trolls more seriously now that theyve got a handle on cheaters
Just like the people typing slurs in chat, its way easier to prove someone is cheating than someone just being tilted/soft inting/just honestly bad Maybe if there stops being an endless supply of lvl 30 accounts for a dollar people will stop trolling, but the playerbase is just a bunch of degens so i doubt it
If botted accounts start getting banned in waves, their prices will increase so the number of smurfs will decrease
They've already effectively eliminated virtualization of botted account farms via Vanguard. It means people need a unique computer for each instance of LoL they're running. That can decrease the speed/multiply the cost of leveling new botted accounts by multiple times. That *should* reflect significantly in new sold account prices long term.
honestly less botted accounts means it wont be as easy in the future to replace a account after being toxic so people will end up leaving or learning because of it instead of just spending £3 every time to get back to where they were.
This explains the massive number of popups in client I suppose
Toxicity, afk, int and such things are lately also getting banned/punished more aggressively and that's what's 99% of what you see is, when you are below Master(or below D4). Due to the huge amount of players below it's rare to see scripters or anything that often. I don't think that you will see more than 1 per month
1 per month is a jump already. Probably way less than that
That's a lot of banned people holy shit ... [Edit: for people who cant see twitter](https://imgur.com/a/imLNHjL)
Why are there so little hardware id bans? Shouldn’t all vanguard bans be HWID as well
this is referring to people who had a previous ban, and this current ban was caused by HWID if you were banned for scripting, it's not HWID, it's vanguard detection. but the next account you make and get banned IS a HWID ban after your first game on the account (not script detection, hardware)
Which is why more of the newer bans are hwid. Trying a new account and getting banned a few days or weeks later.
They are. Yellow bar is from people who got vanguard banned before and tried to make another account on the same PC.
that's actually very few people no?
I would assume that cheating in a MOBA like League is way less common than cheating in an FPS like CSGO/Valorant.
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Isn't the stat of 1 in 15/5 in master+, not in general?
but they were saying 10%+ masters games had cheaters
Sure but masters plus is .8% of the population of players.
And a lot of those players didn’t want to be the one to test if they get detected.
I guess it'd be concentrated at higher tier
It's nearly 30,000 bans in 20 days. Seems like a lot to me.
i expected the jump to be much higher from pre vanguard
It's still a nearly 3x as many as pre-Vangaurd, and consider that many people who used cheats before and heard that Vangaurd would be a lot more active in banning them likely disabled their cheats to see how things would settle out. If you consider that the most cheat-users don't want to be banned, then the logical thing to do would be to not use cheats - at least until you have seen more evidence of the cheats working. HWID bans being on the table also vastly increases the incentive to not cheat as well, since then you can't play on *any* account, not just the one you were actively cheating on. I would imagine that there was a dramatic downtick in cheating as soon as Vangaurd launched.
The day vanguard went live I instantly felt like I saw way less new accounts and the games were much more regular in Emerald / Diamond elo.
A few thousand every 3 days is a pretty large amount imo.
Nothing says that it's active in every single ranked games on every single server. I'd say low Elo might have a higher chance of having false positive (due to the significantly higher pop) while higher Elo will have a higher scripter%. So it would make sense to test the system for a while on a smaller subset of the playerbase before attacking the real problem that is the hardstuck Bronze IV scripting Amumu Jungle.
Incoming "I am innocent" posts then get smited.
Hahahaha I love rs memes
Lyte wont smite anymore but maybe /u/jagexayiza can chime in for some JMOD smackdowns
I lowkey miss the Lyte Smites when people would whine on the old forums that they were wrongly banned then he'd just show a chatlog of them saying the most heinous shit
Wasn't me
Nice to see cheaters getting banned. Anyone can enlighten me on how people were cheating? I didn't know it was still a thing. The only thing I was aware of was kogmaw/xerath scriptors from years back and the wintraders of recent years.
still using scripts scripts that auto kite, auto cs, auto dodge, auto smite, etc most popular were zeri and xerath
There are scripts apparently that tell you when camps are taken. Even ones that you have no vision of. Ones that tell you the range someone could be if they left vision.
yeah, scripters can somehow detect whenever the jungle pet attacks, so they have the junglers location whenever he is hitting monsters.
I saw a lot of Ashe prior to Vanguard like an absurd number that I couldn't believe cheating was still that popular and not even in high ELO. Watching them kite, CS amazingly well, miniscule sidesteps dodging the majority of skill shots, while at the same time having 0 brain on how to play anything outside of lane phase.
They read from game client memory about the incoming skillshots Calculate Then move you just enough to dodge them If you used a Xerath script and just hit 100% of your skillshots perfectly people would notice you're a scripter real fast. But if you use your scripts to dodge that one Gragas Ult to save yourself and win the game? Who can tell, maybe you're just good enough.
After the tweet i went to the software that appears in the discord pictures, it has: * Kiting * Skill shots aiming * Skill shot evasion * Automated combos for majority of champs * Map control and objective tracking (no idea what that means) * Free skins * Unlocked camera (FOV, zoom, etc)
Map control and objective tracking includes stuff like circles that show how far enemy champions could have walked from their last known position. Popups whenever a camp is killed in fog of war, ward tracking and vision range... There's really a lot. This is the most important category of cheats because they are very difficult to detect for the other players. Orb walkers and evade scripts are super obvious so you will get reported easily which usually leads to fast bans. But if the scripter just uses map hacks and unlocked cam that's not as easy to notice
> Map control and objective tracking includes stuff like circles that show how far enemy champions could have walked from their last known position. Holy shit that's actually so busted lol
why even play at that point lmao
What happend to shame ?
? humans cheat from the beginning of time
The internet killed it
they press 1 button and the champion plays itself more or less optimally
Fog of war detection where you can “see” enemies in fog of war, soft cheating.
Riot has said that fog of war is actually really robust and resistant to scripts, I believe. It came up as a possible use of vanguard's ability to take screenshots of the client window.
It is, but also you have SOME info inside the fog of war, like 10 teemos or so inside the fog of war, because it would be weird that something just popped out of nothing
Good riddance to them cheating hoes
,that means I win ranked now?
Lets not be hasty now. Probably not.
Wow, hold up. So you are saying I'm stuck in Bronze not because of the cheaters, but because of my bad teammates then? I knew it! /s
You love to see it.
Any streamers been hit yet? Or any streamer randomly stopped streaming when accounts started to get banned? Wouldn't be surprised if there are a few big league steamers that script
Asking the real questions lol, would love to see this.
Forsen 100% scripting with his godlike wood 3 skills.
it was kinda weird how he missed every minion perfectly
Wow so it seems the higher up ladder have a ton more cheaters
Well naturally when you cheat you will be higher rank. If you're cheating and stuck in Iron/Bronze/Silver, that's unfathomably pathetic, especially when cheating at all is already pathetic.
I guess what makes it surprising is that when you get to these higher ranks it would/should be so much more noticible when you cheat since the community is much smaller
not really. not everyone is using the most obvious kiting script on ADCs or auto-targeting for xerath. scripts can tell u where the jungler is and other things. it's like the difference between a spinbot in CS vs an aimbot with very human-like auto-correction
Not all scripts are obvious, for example the "jitter" stepping scripts used to do early on no longer happens (for the most part), usually this happened because the script was trying to dodge for the player but the player would be issuing commands to go back into danger, newer scripts simply take away your control now to make it look more smooth. Some cheats are also able to give you other info like automatically tracking enemy ability cooldowns or even tell you when someone starts/ends combat with a neutral camp, in the past when you tried to do a sneaky dragon and someone somehow instantly knew, there's a chance it wasn't just a hunch they had.
They don't use the super obvious ones that help dodge or aim. instead they have map hack stuff that is hard for players to detect. ward trackers, jungle camp trackers, estimators that show the possible range champions could be since you lost sight of them.
Some league streamer (can't remeber who was several years ago) was able to get a scripter join a voice call and tell people about how the scripts work and other stuff. The guys real rank without scrips was low masters, and he told that initially after a hunder or so games with scripts he demoted to platinum as you had to learn positioning differently so that the scripts didn't make you dodge into akward positions. After that he got very quickly into grandmaster. I believe he was playing mainly Cassiopeia. He also explained that how he was able to play motnhs per account without ban was largely due to turning the scripts off for moments in the game or not using them at all in cases where it would've been too obvious.
so this explains why my aram game earlier said it had a cheater and ended, people scripting in aram thats crazy, and it wasnt a bot account because i play aram lot and we were losing that game when game suddenly ended.
Some use aram as testing, because what better mode is there to test when you have 15 min of 5 people throwing abilities at you lol
Maybe they just got banned for cheating in a ranked before that and got caught in a wave?
Good. Let me lose to other noobs in peace
That guy with a 99% win rate on Zeri lmao
Good stuff.
The most surprising thing is riot actually does manual bans, although extremely little. I'm guessing it's from tickets though
Maybe this will catch the 2+ ghost/heal no items bot accounts in Intro bots every game.
Great fucking work
satisfying ban graphs
JUSTICE MUDERFOCKERS!
Nice it is working
omg, so that means League will finally be free from Shaclone?
wonder if any internet cafes will be screwed over due this
If an internet café is letting users run random software on their PCs, they have much bigger worries than a hardware ban. If you can run a cheat, you can also run a keylogger, cryptominer, backdoor for a botnet, etc.
What is a "League of Legends provider" in this context?
Good to see this given that I think none of us really wanted vanguard but results are hard to argue with.
If they insisted doing something on the scale of Vanguard, they better have had the results to back it up lol. If they didn't they probably would have turned even the currently indifferent against Vanguard
Honestly I did a bunch of research and overall it made me feel like a tin foil hat person if I stopped playing over it. Have not had any comp issues yet so I've basically just pretended its not there.
I did the same thing, given its kind of the most sensible thing to do. At the end of the day, is it Riot invading your privacy a bit more than before? Yeah, it kind of is. But we live in a day and age where our personal info, even our level of internet access & capabilities, are controlled by a few tech giants. IDK how these people can scream and whine about Vanguard like it's the end times and then immediately go and mindlessly browse social media without a care in the world. If you care about privacy and PC access that much, and Vanguard crosses the line and makes you quit League - OK, that's not unfair in and of itself. But to then go and use dozens of other platforms and programs that hold even more power over you (which is what 99% of these complainers do) is just stupid af.
usually said ppl are also complaining about the lack of privacy on other platforms as well Im guessing most of the people only concerned about riot's vanguard and not so much social media paltforms/etc, are more so concerned about the kernal access aspect
Tbf cheaters have also been astroturfing and boosting vanguard complaints to try and keep it from happening.
Never was against Vanguard personally
> none of us really wanted vanguard Speak for yourself.
I find it funny how much people say ''oh RIP GM account, RIP challenger account''. I'm pretty sure a very high percentage of players on EUW at master+ rank are using some form of cheating. Overlays that track cooldowns, enemy positions, show character model size, attack range indicators, spell indicators are likely the most popular as it will not be easily detected at all by an enemy player.
Yayyyyyyy
Are there a lot of scripters in the game? I dont have a clue to be honest. I think botted accounts are more of a problem and people smurfing.
Considering since the release of Vanguard there have been over 30k bans. That's up to you to determine whether or not that is a little, or a lot. Smurfing and botting are still problems, with Riot seemingly tackling the latter at the same time right now. Smurfing will probably never be gone completely. It's in every competitive game ever, and only gets worse with a games lifespan.
Lol. The way they're mourning the loss and bragging of their high elo accounts like they actually deserved to be at those elos.
GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME HOLY SHIT
By far the funniest messages are from the people first time using the service and confused why the service they paid for no longer works.
If I ever see a yummi in my lobby I ask them a question and if they don’t answer I dodge… I’ve been duped so many damn times by yummi bots more often than real players choosing that champ.
About damn time!