Widespread “VAN” errors have led to unavoidable game losses.
League of Legends players have been facing sudden Vanguard-related disconnect issues throughout today, with North American and European gamers alike reporting they've been impacted by unavoidable losses.
The surprise kernel-level issues across Tuesday, Oct. 8 have seen various "VAN" errors pop-up at the wrong time in matches, removing any impacted players from the LoL lobby. This has been particularly gamebreaking because it seems to remove as many as seven to eight of the players at any one time. This esports.gg writer has been able to confirm the crashes at least once.
In some cases, LoL players are reporting the Vanguard boots are then followed by blue screen issues — reminiscent of the bricking reports Riot shot down when the program first launched — and even overheating CPUs. "I ain't touching League again until this s**t is fixed," one impacted player declared.
One of the biggest complaints from players, outside the obvious, is that the developers have failed to turn on loss protection. Getting booted still results in a loss in ranked or normal LoL matches.
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Riot responds but LoL fans still furious
The Riot Games development team has quickly rushed to solve these widespread issues, confirming it had "seen some reports" and was now investigating.
According to details shared on Riot's @LoLDev account on X (formerly Twitter), the Riot techs believe they've needled in on the underlying problem and may have already found a solution. "We're currently deploying a fix right now to resolve this. It should be fixed shortly." Esports.gg has reached out to the LoL PR team for further information regarding what caused the original issue.
As of publication, no LoL players have been refunded any lost LP from ranked. It's highly unlikely anything is actually refunded for competitive players either.
That lost LP, as well as the general errors, have led to an upswing in many questioning Vanguard's presence in LoL again — a fan sentiment that originally exploded in May when the kernel-level program went live.
"Vanguard was a mistake," one furious LoL fan wrote on Tuesday, while others dubbed it a "useless piece of cr*p" and lamented the fact they had to keep it installed.
There was a positive swing for Vanguard just a few months ago, when Riot declared it had put a "hefty dent" in botting across LoL queues. (It arrived on Mac at the same time.) “Updating LoL’s anti-cheat has achieved a great many of our goals,” Riot’s head of anti-cheats Phillip Koskinas declared at the time, “and it’s been an immediate win bringing LoL’s anti-cheat system into this century.” This latest debacle may have soured some of that August goodwill, however.
Stick around on esports.gg for more LoL news and updates.
