Meet the cute dog emoji that crashed League of Legends Vanguard

Ivan Frigato Published July 2, 2024

Shady players discovered a League of Legends hack to crash opponents’ Vanguard, farming LP and causing everyone else to lose their hand-earned ranks.

League of Legends players reported that a new Vanguard glitch is causing Vanguard to crash. Vanguard is the anti-cheat Riot uses for all of its games, and it can be sensitive. If Vanguard crashes, then players have to completely reboot their computers and try to load in. Competent cheaters were using this at the right time to kick everyone out of the game and end it as a win.

It was a relatively simple hack involving ASCII art of a dog winking. Luckily, Riot is quick to tackle cheats, especially one as simple and destructive as this.

Winking dog crashes League of Legends Vanguard

League of Legends players discovered the following string of text crashed Vanguard: ૮ – ﻌ • ა ૮ – ﻌ • ა ૮ – ﻌ • ა. 

Vanguard crashing is a big deal. it’s what keeps League of Legends pretty cheat-free, even stopping people from using custom skins. No Riot game will launch without an entire PC reboot if Vanguard goes down. By the time players rebooted their computers, launched the game, and loaded in, the game would be lost. According to one user, the text used to crash Vanguard is a series of ASCII emojis that show a dog winking.

While League of Legends doesn’t allow pasting text, players could use a binding to type it without actually typing anything. In fact, these specific characters aren’t regularly allowed to be typed, but binding got around that problem. A cheating duo could use this to farm LP, ranked play points. One player disabled their chat completely to stay in the game and take the win, getting around the DC.

Riot reacted to this cheat incredibly quickly. Within 24 hours, Riot patched the League of Legends hack out of the game. Unfortunately, this was after one duo used it to climb into Masters in Europe West. It’s not clear if Riot will or did take action against players who utilized this cheat. Considering the hardware ban that Riot has instilled, it could mean the end of those players’ League of Legends days.