Riot Games, the developers of popular game League of Legends, are making a very public stand. Through innovative technologies and intentional strategies, they help level the playing field. Vanguard is front and center as far as anti-cheat technology goes, thanks to its strong, kernel-level system. You’ll see it embedded and popular as a feature in games like League of Legends, Valorant. Now, headed into 2025, cheater rates in competitive Valorant matches are under 1% worldwide. This continued decline is an unambiguous indication that Riot Games has been very successful in its efforts to protect the integrity of its gaming environment.
As one of the central figures behind Riot’s anti-cheat efforts, Koskinas explained that the company uses a holistic approach to the problem. You need to require the adoption of basic security measures on Windows OS. These features include the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and Secure Boot. These counters are implemented to prevent integrity manipulation and ensure players are competing on a level playing ground.
Understanding Anti-Cheat Technology
Koskinas pointed to anti-cheat software as one example of helping to take advantage of Windows’ security layers. He stated, “Basically, all the security features that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers have leveraged to protect the operating system, we use or enforce.”
The TPM serves as a strong hardware-rooted security implementation. It might seem like a small issue, but it’s really important for protecting the integrity of your gaming experience. Secure Boot complements this by ensuring that a computer has not been modified or compromised by malware or cheats before it boots up. This two-layered protection massively reduces the potential for cheating.
Riot’s Vanguard system works at the kernel level, giving it deeper access to system resources than typical anti-cheat solutions. This is to help Vanguard better track and shut down cheating software. As Koskinas explained, “If we hit every player every time, they will just change cheats until they find the one that isn’t detected.” The focus on kernel-level access is just one example of Riot’s dedication to always be one step ahead of changing cheating methods.
The Tactics Behind Cheater Infiltration
Koskinas’s team is on a mission to stomp out cheating activities. They take on new tactics, including literally using sock puppet identities, in order to access communities of cheaters and cheat developers. By acquiring cheats through these identities, the team is able to build a record of new threats and create countermeasures to counter said threats.
Koskinas explained the lengths some cheat devs go to in order to stay under the radar. They sometimes make their money selling expensive cheats to exclusive clientele, touting their cheats as luxury goods that sometimes run into the thousands of dollars. This exclusivity is what lets them avoid detection while simultaneously offering an unfair advantage to their users.
“We’ve even gone as far as giving anti-cheat information to establish credibility,” Koskinas noted. His team flexes their proficiency in anti-cheat tech by simulating the reverse engineering of particular cheats. This move greatly increases their reputation among both the gaming and cheating developer communities.
The Challenge of AI in Cheating
As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, Koskinas said he worries about the potential use of AI with video game cheating. He praised the use of AI for screen classification to learn human input and then reproduce those inputs in a realistic way.
“You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” he explained. This raises the stakes for anti-cheat developers as they work tirelessly to keep up with new tactics employed by cheaters.
Even with these setbacks, Riot Games continues to double-down on its kernel-level approach for Valorant’s anti-cheat engine. Koskinas is confident that this proactive strategy will help ensure their top approach stays gameplay integrity-focused. “The best thing I feel like we can do in asking for that level of access and being around like that is being as transparent about the opacity as we can,” he added.
The Future of Fair Play
Riot’s efforts have been warmly received by a sizable contingent of the gaming community. Now more than ever, players are interested in the steps that are not only being made to ensure fair play in competitive spaces. Koskinas mentioned, “A lot of cheaters, if you think about it, they’re kind of young,” reflecting on the demographics typically involved in cheating behaviors.
Riot’s approach to cheaters has been pretty brutal, going so far as to publicly label them as “a brainless pathogen.” This method goes beyond simply preventing cheating; it fosters a community culture that values and reinforces the principles of fair play. We don’t have to do anything except make them look like idiots,” Koskinas said of their tactic of public trolling, as he put it, against cheaters.
