The battle against scripting and cheating in high-ranked League of Legends has reached a critical turning point. Riot Games has officially deployed Vanguard, their kernel-level anti-cheat system, into the game client. This implementation, a direct response to years of community frustration regarding blatant scripting in the Diamond and Master tiers, brings powerful enforcement but also introduces new technical considerations for players.

The early reports are polarized: Vanguard is successfully purging the cheaters, but not without imposing a small performance cost on older machines.

The Good News: High-ELO Cleanup

The primary objective of Vanguard—to eradicate scripting—appears to be a success.

  • Immediate Scripter Drop: High-ELO players, particularly those in the Master and Grandmaster divisions, have reported an immediate and noticeable drop in games featuring obvious scripters (who rely on automated inputs for perfect dodging or ability chains). The aggressive, deep-level security checks performed by Vanguard make the injection of third-party scripts exponentially harder.
  • Visible Ban Waves: Riot has confirmed that the system has already triggered several waves of bans targeting accounts that tested the system early. This visible, non-stop enforcement sends a clear message that the days of using external programs in competitive play are over.

For the vast majority of legitimate competitive players, Vanguard is a necessary and highly effective tool that instantly increased the integrity of their matches.

The Bad News: The Performance Trade-Off

However, the powerful nature of a kernel-level anti-cheat system inevitably carries technical weight:

  • FPS Concerns: A segment of the player base, predominantly those running older or lower-spec PCs, have reported minor but persistent FPS (frames per second) drops, particularly during intense team fights or while the system performs its initial verification checks upon game launch. This stability hit, while small for most, is a noticeable drawback for players already playing near the minimum system requirements.
  • Start-Up Checks: Players have also noted longer client start-up times, as the kernel-level component must initialize and verify the system’s integrity before the League of Legends client is fully operational.

Riot has acknowledged these initial performance issues and stated they are actively pushing optimization hotfixes to mitigate the impact on lower-end hardware, reinforcing that competitive integrity should not come at the cost of playability.

The Verdict: Necessary, But Needs Tuning

Vanguard represents a firm commitment by Riot Games to clean up its most competitive ecosystem. The swift elimination of rampant scripting in high-ELO is a huge win for the community.

While the anti-cheat system is functioning as intended by purging cheaters, the developers now face the ongoing challenge of fine-tuning its performance footprint. The game is cleaner, but Riot must ensure that the pursuit of competitive integrity doesn’t inadvertently exclude players based on their hardware.