Riot Games’ anti-cheat system, Vanguard, which will be brought into League of Legends by March, may be great for eliminating cheaters. However, it’s also why YouTuber SkinSpotlights will be scaling back their content, as it will make it impossible for them to produce specific content to do so going forward.
After what Riot believes has been a successful implementation of the Vanguard system into VALORANT, their FPS title, the devs revealed on Jan. 5 in the Season 2024 Look Ahead video that they will be bringing this anti-cheat system to League by the end of Feb. or early March to help reduce the bots, scripters, and cheaters in League—especially in ranked games. While this is a welcome relief because it means evening the playing field, it does have some disastrous consequences for dataminers, like SkinSpotlights, who use their third-party software for filming purposes and will no longer be able to get the footage they need for their content.
As a result, from Patch 14.4, SkinSpotlights will be scaling back their content because it would be impossible to produce some of their videos, according to Twitter post on Jan. 11. Unfortunately, this also means that other dataminers and content creators who use specific third-party tools will be affected. To top it off, Vanguard will be mandatory and must be active during League gameplay and any time the client is open. And if you uninstall Vanguard, the League client won’t work. So, it seems like there is no workaround.
If SkinSpotlight scales back its content, players won’t have an accurate skin model source to check out before arrival, because even though a skin’s splash art might look fantastic, it doesn’t mean the in-game skin will look good as well. And having these skin model videos has saved players from buying “bad skins for years.“
Hopefully, Riot will do something to help, like develop a creator portal for creators like SkinSpotlights to continue their work. But if not, we’ll likely see less content from dataminers and leakers once Vanguard rolls out.
