Riot Games has revealed the shocking stat that as many as one in 15 League of Legends matches featured some kind of cheater in recent months. However, the company hopes that the launch of its Vanguard anti-cheat software will help to solve the problem.
According to the latest League of Legends dev blog, which specifically focuses on the upcoming anti-cheat technology, “as many as one in 15 games globally has had a scripter or botter in it, but in some regions, this number is as high as one in five.”
This number is much higher than expected, with cheaters in League of Legends considered to be reasonably rare. This assumption from the community has resulted in significant backlash to the launch of Vanguard, with many feeling that it is somewhat unnecessary. However, the stats revealed in the blog post suggest that it is much more of an issue than we thought.
The blog post is full of similar stats around cheaters, including the fact that scripters had a massive 80% win rate in ranked matches and that more than 10% of Master+ games had a cheater in them. It also revealed how hard it can be to combat this through bans for cheaters, as a level 30 account with access to ranked can be bought online for as little as $1.99, making it almost trivial to get another account to cheat with.
Of course the blog post is designed to make players realise that the upcoming implementation of Vanguard is needed. One of the big issues that the article claims is that the current anti-cheat systems have been beaten and that as soon as they make changes cheat manufacturers can react just as quickly. But the hope is that the deeper level anti-cheat from Vanguard will put a stop to this, making it impossible for cheat producers to figure out how it works. The post goes into some fairly deep detail about how the software will work and why it requires permanent access to the deepest levels of your PC.
The final interesting stat to come from the article is that when Riot allowed cheaters to submit hand-written apologies to be unbanned, 91% of those accounts were banned again within six months. This shows that even more unusual tactics to combat cheaters don’t work, and that deep anti-cheat software might be the only way.
Vanguard, which is already part of Valorant, is due to launch for League of Legends in the coming weeks around the world, and will likely result in a lot of backlash. However, given the stats shown in this article, it is probably a good step in the right direction in combating cheaters. It will be interesting to see if there is any noticeable difference in game when it does launch.