Speaking to VG247 at Evo 2024, Tony Cannon, technical lead at 2XKO, confirmed that Riot Game’s upcoming fighting game will feature Vanguard, the company’s proprietary kernel-level anti-cheat software.
Tony stated that “a lot of the cheating that we see in fighting games involves reading input, reading the game state, or doing input injection. It involves modifying the game binary in some way. Vanguard is really good at that, right? It’s kernel-level anti-cheat, so it can detect and prevent a lot of that stuff.”
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Vanguard was first implemented in Riot Games’ Valorant in 2020, and then later rolled out to League of Legends with the hopes that its addition would aid address the game’s ongoing issues with cheating and botting. However, such software has proven controversial among some players, in part due to the software’s fundamental intrusiveness at the kernel level.
For those who don’t know, in a basic sense, software that runs at the kernel level has the highest level of access to the system, meaning the computer’s operating system. This potentially opens you up to a variety of privacy issues. Technical issues have also been known to occur. When implementing Vanguard in League of Legends, users of older versions of Windows or specific configurations have encountered issues. Some have even reported that it stopped the computer from starting, although Riot itself has stated that it cannot confirm any such cases. From this you should understand where most of these fears come from.
When asked about his thoughts on privacy concerns, Tony reiterated Riot’s previous statements, saying outright that they do not and will not collect player data. “Vanguard runs in the core, right? But we don’t collect player information, we don’t read app title bars… We don’t collect it and send it. It’s very targeted and it’s designed to find cheats and prevent people from manipulating the 2XKO binary.
Tony continues, “There’s potential for a company that installs software at the kernel level to do that, we recognize that’s a problem. Valve has their anti-cheat program, and the cheats are getting so sophisticated now that they have to work at the kernel level as well, right? So to protect the experience for all players, you have to work at the kernel level. So it’s like at some point you have to trust Riot, but we have absolutely no interest in exposing players.”
Our full interview with Tony Cannon, which delves into the differences between 2XKO’s server-based rollback and conventional peer-to-peer rollback, whether the inclusion of Vanguard will force 2XKO to stay online, and his thoughts on Riot’s involvement in the competitive fighting game scene, is available here! Read on for the longer conversation.
For those who would like to play the game for themselves, 2XKO will be holding its first public alpha test, which you can sign up for now.
