In the image below, you can see a typical scripting user interface, which draws the ranges of various abilities, indicates which minions are ready to be last-hit, and shows the path of skillshot projectiles. Despite the level of sophistication in some of the scripts that we see for League of Legends, most scripters only see a nominal increase in their win rate. These scripts can range from being very simple (like zoom hacking), to having enormous complexity that caters to the specific nuances of each champion (such as giving Kalista extra maneuvering skills). For example, some common techniques we see include helping players dodge skillshots, zoom out farther than they normally could, or perform perfectly executed combos to smash their opponents’ faces. The first of the cheating subcategories is scripting, where third-party programs forcefully attach themselves to the game client and use the client’s memory and functionality to accomplish otherwise difficult or impossible tasks. We'll explore a few use cases later in this article.
This category of bad behavior can mostly be divided into two subcategories - botting and scripting - which can be combined and implemented in creative ways. Our solution will focus mainly on technical cheating - the kind of cheating that requires the use of third-party applications that interact with the game. We classify these behaviors as cheating because they ruin the competitive experience that makes us love League. There are certain behaviors that we discourage in League of Legends because we never want our players to find themselves questioning the integrity of the game. This is a lofty goal, and it’s been the driving force behind the changes that we’ve made to our anti-cheat technology and strategy. Detection and response systems would still be important, but we’d be able to use them as little as possible. If we succeed at that, our players wouldn’t have to experience a bot or scripter ruining their game. It works, but it’s not ideal.Ī more effective solution prevents cheating in the first place. In addition, players have exposure to cheaters in their games while we wait for our systems to detect them. It makes sense, but it means that the barrier to entry for creating cheats in the first place is still relatively low. Today, this approach is still the source of most common anti-cheat solutions that we see. In general, most techniques boil down to letting cheaters play a few games, detecting their anomalous behavior (either by tracking what changes they made to the game or analyzing their gameplay patterns), and then removing them from the player population. When it comes to keeping our products fair, my team focuses primarily on three important tenets: prevention, detection, and deterrence.įor many years, detection and deterrence were the strategies seen across most game studios. With this article I hope to give you a general understanding of the types of threats we see in the cheating space and how we are changing League of Legends to mitigate them - with a few gritty details along the way. That said, we don't think efficacy depends solely on secrecy, and we've been hard at work developing technical solutions for this problem space. There are some things that we can’t share for the sake of players and the integrity of the game. We have to juggle open and honest conversation with protecting the secret sauce. If you’re still getting critical errors or have concerns about your legitimate third-party products, please check out our known issues and fixes or contact player support for more individualized assistance.īefore we get started, I should preface the article with this: talking about anti-cheat is tricky.
LEAGUE OF LEGENDS CHEAT ENGINE SOFTWARE
We’ve worked with many popular third-party software vendors and creators to ensure their tools will continue to be compatible with the game. For a more high-level understanding of how we handle security, check out our article on the Evolution of Security at Riot. In this article, I’m going to show you some of the details and strategies behind our latest anti-cheat initiative, including a technical overview of the steps we took to mitigate certain types of cheating. These days I work on Riot’s Anti-Cheat team, helping secure League of Legends from scripts, bots, and exploits. I’m Michael “Perma” VanKuipers, and I used to be one of those bad actors I spent over a decade developing cheats for various games and earned the ire of at least one large game studio in the process. The pressure is on for game studios to level up when it comes to detecting and preventing bad actors. The scope and complexity of cheat development grows every year along with the stakes in online gaming. Combating cheats is an ever-evolving arms race.