Vanguard 2 headed to Mac as Riot cracks down on cheaters

Riot Games, developers of popular competitive games League of Legends and VALORANT, revealed that their proprietary anti-cheat Vanguard is headed to Mac. This implementation, referred to as "Vanguard 2," will be mandatory for all League of Legends players on macOS.

In the dev blog authored by Riot Games Head of Anti-Cheat Philip "MirageOfPenguins" Koskinas, he confirmed that the kernel-level anti-cheat will be implemented on Mac.

Before that, though, he spilled the beans on all Vanguard's successes on LoL. While all the other Riot titles have had Vanguard since their release, League of Legends is older than Vanguard and previously operated under a different, less strict anti-cheat called Packman.

I'll skip over his sandwich metaphor-filled discussion: Vanguard has been an amazing success for the MOBA. Metrics like time to detect and act on cheaters, scripter count, bot detection, and more show that they are headed in the right direction.

Players on macOS can expect Vanguard 2, or more accurately, embedded Vanguard (mVG). This results from Vanguard's successes on PC: many botters and cheaters now use macOS to circumvent the anti-cheat requirement.

"The unique security of the macOS environment allows us to be a little less stringent on defending its kernel, so as the name implies, this won’t require any extra installs," says MirageOfPenguins.

Furthermore, he revealed that this is not the first time Vanguard has crossed operating systems. The same embedded version of Vanguard is already running on consoles for VALORANT and mobile for Wild Rift.

Vanguard on macOS implies the possibility of VALORANT being natively playable for Mac users.

According to the same dev blog, Mac users can expect the new anti-cheat later this year.

"We hope it will be the final blow to bots," says MirageOfPenguins