League devs respond as Vanguard falsely bans massive wave of players

League of Legends’ Vanguard anti-cheat was pointed at trying to eliminate scripters and botters from the game, but some networking issues resulted in a massive wave of players getting falsely banned during their matches.

This wasn’t a small issue, either, and something that affected a couple players. People have had almost everyone in their match immediately drop out as a result of this problem with Vanguard’s anti-cheat.

What’s more, some of the players who were affected by this issue haven’t had their bans lifted. Not only were they dropped from their matches, they lost their accounts.

This isn’t true for everyone, but even those who weren’t banned received a loss alongside an LP penalty. League’s ranked system heavily punishes leavers, meaning that those affected will be impacted for multiple matches and lose much more LP based on just one loss.

Those who leave games will get drastically decreased gains for multiple matches past the initial loss, and players get saddled with the burden whether they got reported or not.

The devs have since responded and explained why these bans were handed out, confirming that they were false and a result of a “backend networking issue.”

“We’re investigating an occurence where players received errors and Vanguard error messaging due to a backend networking issue. Keep an eye in-client for updates. Any bans or restrictions that were served due to this error will be lifted ASAP.”

While the devs have confirmed that the harshest penalties will be lifted, there’s no news on whether players who have received LP penalties or who lost LP from losing a match will get any sort of recompense.

Considering those LP losses could have resulted in players getting demoted and being set back substantially in their personal goals on the climb, backlash from players on this makes sense.

Additionally, no detail has been given on how this happened other than the announcement from the dev team. League players have been skeptical of Vanguard ever since it was implemented, with many claiming that the game no longer works on their PC because of it.