Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux

While previously you've been able to play League of Legends on Linux, and there's some pretty die-hard fans using Wine to play it, that's set to end soon with Vanguard being introduced.

Cheating in online games is a constant battle for game developers, so I certainly appreciate it's a difficult subject to approach. Developers want players to have the easiest time getting into the game, that's obvious, but with so many cheats out there it's a difficult balancing act. They stated that "as many as 1 in 15 games globally has had a scripter or botter in it, but in some regions, this number is as high as 1 in 5" which is pretty problematic.

For those curious on their thoughts about Linux, and people playing LoL on Linux going forward they said this:

Q: What about Linux?

We've never officially supported Linux, and it's true that the current Lutris-based implementation for League (that uses wine) will not be able to satisfy the Vanguard driver requirements. Linux does not currently afford us sufficient ability to attest boot state or kernel modules, and the difficulty in securing it is only compounded by all the frustrating differences between distributions. Even allowing emulation is an exceptionally dangerous game, as many cheats could then just run on the host, manipulating or analyzing the VM in a way that would be invisible to Vanguard within it.

Half of anti-cheat is making sure the environment hasn't been tampered with, and this is extremely hard on Linux by design. Any backdoors we leave open for it are ones developers will immediately leverage for cheats, and yesterday, there were just over 800 Linux users on League. We have evaluated this risk to not be worth the payoff.

And about having it be open source:

Q: Why not open source the driver?

Anti-cheat is an iterative, indefinite battle. Many of the preventative checks that Vanguard makes to ensure system integrity are deliberately stealthy, bleeding-edge, and in some cases, built on total pillars of sand. We benefit extensively from the confusion that the system inflicts on cheaters, and letting them simply browse the detection methods would exhaust our supply faster than we could invent new ones. An open source anti-cheat application would be totally useless (April Fools 2021).

So there you have it, you simply won't be able to play it on Linux with the introduction of Vanguard. We already knew this but at least they're trying to give more detailed explanations.

See their full blog post on the LoL website which goes into plenty more detail on their struggle against cheaters.