Riot lets Vanguard run on demand for League of Legends players

Riot has started letting Vanguard sit idle until League of Legends actually launches, a change that cuts the anti-cheat’s boot-time footprint on sufficiently secured PCs. The shift moves Vanguard from a constant background presence to an on-demand session model, which is exactly the kind of practical cleanup players have asked for since the anti-cheat landed in the game.

Riot laid out the change in its June 24, 2026 post, Incoming: Vanguard On-Demand, by Phillip Koskinas. The new mode is tied to Windows 11 security features and is not a blanket switch for every machine. Riot is limiting it to PCs that meet its “sufficiently secured” standard, and a Reddit-linked summary of the announcement says players have to enable optional security features for their motherboard before Vanguard will run that way.

That makes this less like a settings tweak and more like a trust model. Riot is still keeping the anti-cheat in place, but it is trying to reduce the sense that League installs a permanent resident on your PC. For players who have been annoyed by any extra software hanging around in memory, the day-to-day change is simple: Vanguard should no longer load at boot, and it should only wake up when you fire up the game on a supported Windows 11 setup.

The security angle matters because Riot is not pretending the tradeoff disappeared. The company still wants the protection Vanguard provides, and the on-demand approach only exists where the system can keep that security posture intact. Reporting around the feature also ties the rollout to Microsoft’s XBOX OS Security Team, which helped make the change possible. That detail points to how tightly this is bound to Windows 11 rather than to PC gaming in general.

Riot has already been building this story in public. Its /dev: Vanguard x LoL post introduced Vanguard to League, and a later /dev: Vanguard x LoL Retrospective framed the anti-cheat as an ongoing project rather than a one-and-done install. Vanguard first arrived in League of Legends on April 11, 2024, so this on-demand session model lands about two years after players were forced to reckon with it.

The big win here is not a new mode or a gameplay overhaul. It is a quieter startup, less background clutter, and a more tolerable answer to one of PC gaming’s oldest complaints: anti-cheat should protect the match without acting like it owns the machine.