Buy a second-hand Ryzen 7 5800X3D and get a "banned package". Riot hardware bans the whole machine, and innocent players are tricked.

Abstract:

A PC player in Germany recently purchased an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor from the second-hand platform Kleinanzeigen. After installing it, he found that he was excluded from the "Fearless Contract".

Hardware bans are not limited to a single component. According to XDA Developers, Vanguard not only blacklisted this CPU, but also blacklisted the motherboard and hard drive in the player's system. Riot has made it clear that this restriction cannot be lifted manually.

Vanguard is an anti-cheat system developed by Riot, consisting of a user-mode client and a kernel-mode driver. It starts running when the system boots and checks the hardware configuration. Once it identifies flagged hardware, it denies the device access to all Riot games.

Hardware bans target physical computer parts, not game accounts. Therefore, changing accounts, reinstalling the system or reinstalling the game cannot remove the restriction.

What’s even more troublesome is that before players buy a second-hand CPU, there is no feasible way to check whether the hardware has been included in the banned list.

Riot currently does not disclose the specific mechanism by which Vanguard identifies specific CPUs. Riot has previously explained that Vanguard can read the TPM 2.0 module identifier, and AMD processors integrate the TPM within the chip, so the hardware ban may be tied directly to the processor itself.

If players want to continue playing Riot's games, the only way is to replace major components such as the CPU, motherboard, and hard drive, which is equivalent to assembling a new computer.

This incident exposed a gray area of ​​the hardware banning mechanism: second-hand accessories that are fully functional may have "criminal records" that cannot be discovered by any conventional testing.

As of now, Riot has not publicly responded to this incident.