That's the increase in AI-based cheat detections over a single competitive season. Not a gradual rise. Not a trend line inching upward. A tripling — in months — of a category of cheating that barely existed a few years ago.

Riot Games updated Vanguard — its kernel-level anti-cheat — to effectively brick thousands of dollars worth of DMA cheating hardware, then mocked the affected users on social media. It was a crowd-pleasing moment. The community cheered. The cheat sellers adapted within weeks.

Meanwhile, the same kernel-level anti-cheat systems that target DMA devices require players to modify low-level system settings — IOMMU, VBS, Secure Boot configurations — just to launch the game. Playe…