Dev’s gonna have to pull a Flappy Bird 💰💰💰

Don’t get it twisted. We definitely agree.

This will effectively add any computer it’s installed on to a botnet and create another attack vector (via Vanguard).

The tradeoff I described, tho, is one on the Riot side. And as much as this form of anticheat is ridiculous, it makes sense given Riot’s business model. A bunch of cheaters can easily waste their money and engineering effort. They made the deliberate choice to narrow their market of potential players to those who are willing to install Vanguard and feel that Vanguard pushes most cheaters out of that narrow market. It makes sense.

Re: That tradeoff, tho, users aren’t involved. The tradeoff users have is between installing the game or not.

And again we both agree, installing this to an important computer or on your home network carries a tonne of risk.

Not that I’m defending Vanguard, but Riot’s choosing to invest in developer resources for Vanguard (and in finding cheat developers) so they don’t have to invest in server capacity or developer resources to support cheater only lobbies.

As long as their anticheat is effective, every cheater they can repel is some amount of server capacity that legitimate players can use.

Also, cheaters in the types of games Riot makes will cause some amount of opponents to simply leave the game in frustration. So part of this is just trying to keep players who are willing to install the game happy.

They’ve chosen to make free to play games, so this tradeoff actually makes sense for Riot. But again, kernel level hacks aren’t something everyone will or even should install.

It’s all about tradeoffs.

This is definitely a case of overloading a feature when they could just make multiple features.

I personally love the ability to easily switch the active Bluetooth device (so I love the new behaviour), but not everyone has this need.

They should just have added multiple quick settings tiles so we can all be happy.

It’s weird how I didn’t really care about the pinhole camera or my Pixel 5 weird dimensions until Ambient Mode started highlighting it. When ambient mode shipped (silently), I seriously thought I forgot that the aspect ratio wasn’t 16:9 and the pinhole was so visible all these years. Turns out the bars hid these distractions.

The feature looks great on Desktop, but on mobile, I kinda prefer the bars actually hiding the edges of the screen, esp in fullscreen mode in a darker room.

It’s cool that you can just turn it off, and hopefully, in the future, they let you toggle the feature in fullscreen and portrait mode separately.