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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: Ali_JohnI have M1 Max with 32 gb and LoL on MacOS does not have Vanguard. Even with the Metal option on(which gives great FPS improvement over OpenGL), the OS is so garbage that if you move the camera game goes from 144 Frames to 100ish and keeps jumping up and down. I have to restart the system just so that OS does not get weird with it's resource management system. MacOS being supported while Linux not is more like a side-effect that we are playing the windows version. If someone can find a way to run MacOS build on Linux we might be fine.
The relevant project for that is theoretically speaking darling, but if I hear you correctly it seems to run on Rosetta, which means that making a port could be achieved with Wine and a good Arm emulator(or an ARM device).
Further research shows: LOL runs on emulated the emulation layer of Rosetta and probably also on the wine part obtaining the relevant x86 binaries could be enough.
Last edited by LoudTechie on 14 April 2024 at 12:18 pm UTC
Quoting: kaktuspalmeClient side anti cheat will never work. I don't get why no one tries server side cheat detection. I think AI in server side cheat detection might be a very useful thing.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. You kind of need both. Server side is needed, obviously, but there are ways to cheat that can be entirely invisible to the server.
For example, imagine a cheat that takes the app's wall rendering shader, and makes it semi transparent. Now the cheater can see through walls. They could still be playing with mouse and keyboard, no scripting involved.
Quoting: GetBeanedQuoting: EnkhielFrom the "big" 4 MOBAs, I am glad I enjoy Heroes of the Storm the most running excellently on Linux. I feel sorry for those peeps though that will be affected. Maybe give HotS a try :)
I stand by HotS being the best of the lot, even though it never reached the popularity of the others. How's the playerbase nowadays? I always get an urge to go back, but I know a few years ago it seemed like they were winding down development.
I personally think HotS is in a good spot for what it is.
Queue times are very fast if you are not a grand master, and Khaldor is still hosting a lot of enjoyable tournaments.
I'd say give it another shot!
Quoting: ShabbyXFor example, imagine a cheat that takes the app's wall rendering shader, and makes it semi transparent. Now the cheater can see through walls. They could still be playing with mouse and keyboard, no scripting involved.
That example is still a server problem. It's giving the client information that it doesn't need.
Quoting: EhvisQuoting: ShabbyXFor example, imagine a cheat that takes the app's wall rendering shader, and makes it semi transparent. Now the cheater can see through walls. They could still be playing with mouse and keyboard, no scripting involved.
That example is still a server problem. It's giving the client information that it doesn't need.
It's not as simple as that though. Even if the server doesn't disclose players / items that should not be visible, it can't do that very precisely for the simple reason that latency exists. You can't afford to reveal players _just_ as they become visible, because to the client it looks like they pop through doors. So taking latency into account and revealing another player earlier with a margin of error, that can still give an edge to such a cheater.
Maybe **then** will they realize they are approaching cheating wrong.
Seriously, what if instead people voted if someone is pleasant to play with or not after a match, and you match pleasant people together and unpleasant people together. That also solves the toxicity problem with the same mechanism.
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