Vanguard is proven spyware. If you installed that shit, I'd wipe the OS and reflash the BIOS.

Ah yes, people who don’t even know what motherboard they have will have to update their BIOS

So glad I stopped playing league of legends over a decade ago. (And it wasn't even because of this, you could play it on a completely normal computer back then, I just ended up liking Dota more)

When the arms race with cheaters has gotten there you should change strategies in fighting them.

This is why I dislike Tencent (parent of Riot Games)

we always knew video games would be the end of the world since gamergate

tfw millions of dollars of anticheat development is defeated by one PCI-E-boi

It's all about control. They demand control over servers, not allowing you to self host. They also demand control over communities, by putting them all in one big server or other controlled channels (but sometimes refusing to properly moderate them like in league of legends).

Now, they want to control your device.

That would require them to run more servers, any extra CPU time is an indirect cost. By moving anti cheat to the client (along with other stuff like hit detection,) then they are only spending the customers CPU time not their server CPU time.

It's about money.

In basic terms, your computer has to say something like I clicked here, to send it to the server and orchestrate with the other clients. On the flip side the server sends stuff back that your client can show you were the other clients are. All this raw data can be used by a cheater however they want. If we minimise the data available to you or a cheater to be the levellest, that would be the client only sends mouse and keyboard inputs, and all the client gets back from the server is pre-rendered frames. Think game streaming, from a cheating perspective is the problem solved? No, they just make a program to read screen and move the mouse when it sees an enemy faster than any human can, or more realistically to avoid that detection, just act slightly better than the cheaters opponent. As other comments have mentioned, game streaming for everyone would be expensive for the server. And if your clever you'll realise that even BIOS level detection won't stop a separate computer with a webcam doing keyboard mouse emulation, hence the comments about the developers wanting control. AI deepfakes can attest that even gameplay moderation will get more difficult as the input emulation gets more human like.

So the only hope is to do enough of all these things so that cheaters deem it not worth the effort/not profitable enough.

Why would a game owned by China want full control of a PC?

Maybe cheating is the excuse because selfhosting and server mods just banning cheaters would work if they actually cared about cheating.

In the video game 'black market', boosting/carry services and selling accounts is big business. You can hire minimum wage employees in whatever country has the cheapest labor costs, throw them in front of a PC with aimbot software and have them escort customers for US $30/hr.