League of Legends Tests Security Changes to Combat Cheating

New anti-cheat measures have begun rolling out to the League of Legends PBE to combat those who use third-party software to gain unfair advantages.

The news of the game client security changes was announced in a post on the PBE boards that explained the purpose of the new security measures. Riot Perma explained in the post that the security measures which will only affect PBE players for the time being may cause some errors when running third-party programs even if the software isn't used to cheat.

"We've begun rolling out security changes to the League of Legends game client today on the Public Beta Environment," Riot Perma said on the PBE boards. "Our goal with these changes is to make it harder to develop or use cheating applications in League. We wanted to proactively communicate these changes in case you run into any abnormal failures while running the game in this environment. If you are experiencing new game crashes it may indicate an incompatibility between software on your computer and our new changes."

This doesn't mean that players who use some third-party software for other purposes will have to completely give it up when playing League though. Instead, Riot Games is asking players to help troubleshoot any issues that begin with players being met with a critical error message. If such a message appears, Riot asks that players disable any of the following software in order to correct the issue.

• Security software (anti-virus and anti-malware products)
• In-game overlay software (Steam, Discord, TeamSpeak, Overwolf, ASUS Sonic Radar, etc)
• Streaming software (XSplit, OBS, Raptr, etc)
• Video capture software (Fraps, ShadowPlay, etc)

Assuming the error message problem is resolved by disabling all of these types of programs listed above, Riot then asks players to share exactly which programs were disabled. There's no guarantee that the conflicting problems will be resolved to allow the software to be used alongside the new security measures, but Riot is willing to work with the software creators to resolve any issues.

"While we try our best to maintain compatibility with as much legitimate third party software as possible, we are not in control of these products, and an update can break compatibility with our solution at any time. We want to be aware of these incompatibilities so that we can work with software vendors to resolve them."

The security measures have begun rolling out for the PBE version of League of Legends, so look for them next time you log onto that account.