If I play in a virtual machine, am I in danger of a cheating ban?

Karunamon·Jan 17, 2018·3 votes·6,526 views

After Windows annoyed me one too many times, and reading that there was a way to play games inside a VM at full speed, I started running Linux on my gaming machine and then doing all the gaming stuff inside a purpose-built VM that has direct hardware access to my video card and USB ports.

This is the guide I followed

It works quite well! Good frame rates, great ping, no visual glitches, 32" display at glorious 3840x1440. I now have my perfect fusion of work machine and play machine.

However, ever since setting this up, I haven't touched any matchmade games after hearing reports that other games treat this as a sign of shenanigans. For instance, Valve started kicking people out of CSGO games when they detected the game was running inside of a VM

Does league do anything similar?

11 Comments

Sairek CearesteJan 17, 20185 votes

Sounds like something you should ask in a support ticket.

I'm not trying to be a sarcastic asshole. I'm being genuine. We players can speculate at best, but it would be a good idea to know for sure on whether it's allowed or not.

Mr Jungle OTWJan 17, 20183 votes

No. I've been playing in a qemu VM with passthrough for almost two years. I have never been banned for cheating or the use of third party software.

Any method League could use to detect a virtual machine can be easily subverted, as easily as the methods Nvidia drivers use to detect a virtual machine can be subverted.

Between the ease of subversion and the sheer number of innocent players that would be banned, I don't see this changing in the future.

Imperial PandaaJan 17, 20183 votes

Please ask with a support ticket and then tell us. This is good information to have

Silent GravityJan 17, 20182 votes

You should be completely fine running inside a VM, but one line in there makes me mildly concerned.

{quoted}

32" display at glorious 3840x1440.

That sounds like it would either distort the image by stretching it out uncomfortably or it would show a larger portion of the map than standard: like Jhin's ult zooming out so that more is visible.

Zooming out is very certainly considered bannable cheating.

KarunamonJan 18, 20181 votes

Gack, that was a typo. It's 3440, not 3840. 3840 would be some ridiculous nonstandard thing.

The 3440 size is rather large, but I assure you that's the native resoluton of my monitor (Acer X34) and no modifications were made. It's quite funny, when you spawn on the bottom side, you can see the edge of the skybox cut off.

https://i.imgur.com/E6ZgcTW.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/9kyDsg7.jpg

Frothy White GooJan 18, 20182 votes

yes.

the reason being is that they auto flag botters for using VM, so if you are known to use a VM you will get flagged as a botter

KarunamonJan 22, 20182 votes

Well, as a follow-up, I got the typical nice, but useless non-committal Riot automated non-answer:

Hello Karunamon,

Unfortunately, I can't give you a clear answer regarding other tools as we currently do not officially support any third party applications. A good rule to go by is that as long as it doesn't modify the client intended function nor give you an unfair advantage then it should be okay. If you're still not sure, then I would suggest that you refrain from using it or ask around on the boards to get a better understanding of the tool.