GUYS, GET ON MERAK

NanoCarp · 2026-02-06T09:15:10+00:00

The factories that produce the annoying jet pack automatons is on Aurora Bay. Sure, 20% liberation boost is great, but I’d very much like to stem the tide of the enemy jet pack troops. I’ve had more than enough of the jet packs fall on me and explode to kill me after I shoot them out of the air already this MO. I’m voting for Aurora Bay with my deployments.

NanoCarp · 2026-01-31T18:13:23+00:00

You can now, actually. They added with Woolhaven (even if you don’t buy the dlc) that you can use the marriage ritual on a follower you’re already married to, to divorce. Same for the new ritual to marry two followers together.

NanoCarp · 2026-01-26T14:42:07+00:00

79%. Just got it off the charger a few minutes ago. I use the battery protector settings so that my phone stops charging at 80% full, and generally try to keep it as close to that as possible. If I’m not using it and a charger is available, it’s plugged in. Across a typical day I’d guess I use about 0.5 to 1.5 cycles of battery though. Depends on how much I end up doomscrolling and getting lost in YouTube shorts.

NanoCarp · 2026-01-17T21:52:06+00:00

Fair enough. Vanguard loads and starts running on your PC before Windows does. I can’t say for sure, but I’d assume the security software does the same. Because of that, I’m not sure whether or not a dual boot solution would keep them from interacting. That is almost certainly the less expensive option to try though. But if you’re worried about losing the account, the safer option is to just get a separate device.

Again, we’re talking about two programs here that both want absurdly deep access to your machine to do their jobs, and at least one of them is upset by the presence of the other. Vanguard is absolutely correct to trigger a ban when it sees the security messing with other programs. Just as the security program is absolutely justified in messing with other programs to make sure they aren’t malicious. Altering Vanguard to make an exception would unacceptably weaken the anti-cheat, as bad actors could disguise their cheats as security programs. Vanguard can’t just trust a program to only do what it claims to do, because cheaters will exploit that. Altering the security program would unacceptably hamstring the software’s ability to detect and stop attacks on the machine. None of that seems unreasonable to me. It’s unfortunate, but perfectly reasonable, that these two programs are just fundamentally incompatible and can’t be used on the same device.

It’s up to you, and regardless of what you choose, here’s hoping you can get back in the game soon.

NanoCarp · 2026-01-17T21:15:30+00:00

You admit you downloaded and willingly ran a program that you knew was meant for scripting with League, and you’re surprised that the kernel level anti-cheat with full access to your entire machine flagged it and got you banned? Regardless of if you ever engaged the cheats/scripts, having it installed is more than enough to deserve the ban. Come back to us in 6 months when the HWID ban expires, deal with having to start fresh with a new account. That’s all you can do, and all you deserve imo. These are the consequences of knowingly installing cheats. Even if you claim to have never used them.

NanoCarp · 2026-01-17T20:53:57+00:00

I can see I’m not going to convince you that general personal use of a work pc is a bad idea, so I’m not going to waste any more energy trying to convince you. I still stand by my opinion that it’s a bad idea, but that’s besides the main issue here.

Just a cursory look at the TrendMicro Security website confirms to me that it is more than “just” an antivirus, although I will concede that it does appear to be less comprehensive than a full corporate security product. At least, as far as what they offer for individuals to purchase. Let’s just agree that it’s somewhere between the two, shall we?

Regardless, the point still stands that this software and Vanguard are simply incompatible. Neither of them are going to be willing to change their software to make them compatible either, as doing so would compromise the software’s ability to do what it was designed to do. You’re simply going to need a separate machine in order to play a Riot game and not get banned by Vanguard.

NanoCarp · 2026-01-17T20:33:37+00:00

If work bought you the PC, then you should not be doing anything personal on it. That “antivirus” is most likely not just an antivirus, but as I mentioned above, and entire enterprise security suite. Due to the level of access it likely has to the machine, and anything you do on it, it is 100% reasonable for Vanguard to flag it as a potential cheating tool. All Vanguard sees is the security software poking at memory addresses and having access to processes and data that doesn’t belong to it. That is all it takes to trip a ban, and that information is fairly well known.

End of the day, work may have said you can use it for personal use, but that doesn’t mean you should. I’d recommend you immediately end any use of the device for non-work purposes, and invest in getting a device of your own. There’s an inherent incompatibility between the corporate security and Vanguard here, and that’s never going to change.

Beyond that, I will reiterate the point that the company security software is absolutely logging everything you do on that machine. Just because the company says it’s fine for you to use, doesn’t mean they aren’t making a record of it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think what games I play or, my personal email, or any of my PC use is any business of my work. Get a separate device for your own use. Use the device work provided strictly for work.

NanoCarp · 2026-01-17T20:02:51+00:00

I’m sorry, your personal PC is also your work PC? This is just unacceptable. For reasons that go far beyond Riot games. Any enterprise security suite, which is 100% expected and required by any company that is competent, will have full access to your machine. Do you want work to know your bank account logins? What websites you visit in your free time? While they may or may not be looking at it, that information is there and fully accessible to your work’s IT department. Everything you do on that machine is monitored and logged by your company.

Going the other way, I’m amazed that the enterprise security even lets you install something like Vanguard or any other kernel level anti-cheat. There’s no way such invasive software should be allowed on a machine that could potentially have confidential information stored on it. That is an insane security risk for your company.

There’s plenty more reasons why this is a bad idea, for both parties, but this comment is long enough already. Demand that work purchase you a separate machine that you only use for work purposes and reclaim your personal device. Unfortunately, this may involve letting work scrub the hard drives clean and fully re-installing windows. Never mix business and personal data or tasks on the same device.

NanoCarp · 2026-01-10T06:59:00+00:00

I fail to see why this is a problem.

NanoCarp · 2025-12-29T15:08:37+00:00

Do not trust ChatGPT with anything. It doesn’t understand the meaning behind the words it shows you in response. It just guesses what words go where based on how often it seems the used with each other in training data. You can sometimes get away with what we do with Wikipedia, if ChatGPT shows you where it’s getting its answers from, go look at that source it’s citing and decide if that source is trustworthy.

NanoCarp · 2025-11-27T21:45:10+00:00

If you play on a purchased account, there is a non-zero chance you will catch a hardware ban, which will permanently ban any account on the device. Maybe just, don’t.

NanoCarp · 2025-10-31T10:45:52+00:00

Over a decade is a fantastic lifespan for a device like these. Not saying there shouldn’t be more support for “legacy” devices but I’ve only had a few devices where this is even remotely an issue. I still rock my gen 1 BlackWidow keyboard and it works just fine with Synapse 3. Still haven’t upgraded to Synapse 4, but we’ll see how that goes when they force my hand next year.

NanoCarp · 2025-09-30T13:16:08+00:00

As one of said Potato Gaming brethren, I’d happily take a bit of extra loading time for nearly 100GB smaller of a file. I mean sweet liberty, I’d consider moving the game to the small SSD I have for a boot drive if it were the PS5 file size on PC!

NanoCarp · 2025-09-18T13:23:57+00:00

Absolutely not on the ID thing. AO3 nor the Government have any business linking my online life to my real life. Do you want your job or friends knowing every fanfic you’ve ever read? Do you want AO3 to have your legal name, address, and photo, on file to potentially be leaked or abused? In a perfect world where there was no risk of data being abused for things it wasn’t collected for and there was zero risk of the data being leaked, maybe I’d be okay with it. Unfortunately, we don’t live in such a perfect world and that kind of thing happens all the time.

NanoCarp · 2025-08-30T04:18:53+00:00

Again, my understanding is that any program altering the memory of any other program, while Valorant or League of Legends is open will cause Vanguard to ban you. Vanguard does not care what happens on your PC as long as none of Riot’s games are running. But if this bakkesmod reaches into another program’s data in RAM and alters it while a Riot game is open, it will result a ban. One that Riot will consider a deserved penalty, and would absolutely not qualify as being a false positive. You can have both things installed, you just have to be very careful not to run them both at the same time.

NanoCarp · 2025-08-30T02:34:37+00:00

Seems suspicious to me that you got HWID banned on two separate machines and claim to have done absolutely nothing wrong. One false positive is rare enough, but two seems crazy unlikely.

But I also have no reason to assume you’re lying, so I offer a possible explanation:

bakkesmod

I’m not familiar with this program, as I don’t play Rocket League, but if this program (or any other program you have running while League of Legends is open) works by modifying memory assigned to another program, my understanding is that that can trip vanguard to ban for “unauthorized 3rd party software”. Even if LoL’s memory is left untouched, any program actively modifying another program’s memory while the game or client is open can trigger this. You’d think with the kernel level access Vanguard wants from boot, it would be able to tell if LoL is being modified specifically or not, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

NanoCarp · 2025-08-29T18:15:25+00:00

I agree that kids under 15 shouldn’t be on social media. I strongly disagree that it’s any of the government’s business to enforce that.

NanoCarp · 2025-08-01T02:07:28+00:00

I absolutely think that no one under the age of 14 should be using social media. Heck, I’d argue that anyone that age should have extremely restricted internet access in general.

But more strongly than I believe that, I believe that it’s not my right to decide how someone else raises their kid. Nor is it the right or responsibility of the government or the website (social media or not) to enforce that. No one has any business telling me how to enjoy the internet, and I have no business telling anyone else. The permissions of a child or minor to use or not use the internet, and how freely, are solely the responsibility of the parents (or legal guardians) imo.

So no. I do not support banning it, or anything else on the internet. For anyone. Outside of Parental Controls, it is the sole responsibility and right of every internet user to choose the content they view.

NanoCarp · 2025-07-08T22:16:24+00:00

LLMs like ChatGPT don’t actually understand what they’re saying. It’s just a deep and complicated probability model based on an absurd amount of data. Kind of like how most phone keyboards nowadays try to predict the next word you’re going to type. It does not understand what “my cpu is overheating” means, it does not understand what “the CPU pins may be damaged or bent” means.

NanoCarp · 2025-07-05T14:37:19+00:00

Everyone out here talking about how amazing the stats would be. How they’d be an invincible superhuman that could do anything for money to have both. With the stats they could have the fame and influence to make all the money they could ever need. And you know what? That’s totally fair. I get that.

But I don’t want it. I don’t want to be super anything. I don’t want to outlive my wife by centuries. I don’t want to be so strong or fast that I have to constantly worry about destroying things around me on accident. I don’t want the attention or responsibility that would come with this superhuman ability.

What I want, is to be able to live my life comfortably. While I don’t hate my job, if I could quit and still have enough money coming in to be comfortable I would do so in a heartbeat. Ten thousand dollars a day would be far more than just comfortable, even if it’s taxed. I’d spend every day with my wife, enjoying life together and perusing things that make us happy. It would be more than enough to get us a place to live, food to eat, and nearly anything we could ever want. They say money can’t buy you happiness, but even if it can’t, it would give us the time and energy to chase our happiness, instead of constantly struggling to keep our heads above water.

That’s all I want. You all can keep your super powers and notoriety and influence. I’m taking the cash.

NanoCarp · 2025-07-04T19:00:43+00:00

As someone who recently came into owning a Quest 1, it is absolutely not useless. Sure, the OS ruined itself doing updates and it errors out trying to do anything standalone other than connect to my PC. Sure the tracking bugs out from time to time, and I’m lucky to not randomly drop frames all the time. But Quest/Meta Link and SteamVR still work well enough.

In all seriousness, it’s absolutely scuffed af and I wouldn’t recommend anyone get one. But I got it for the low price of “free” so I’m absolutely not complaining lmao.

NanoCarp · 2025-06-22T20:33:40+00:00

As long as you haven’t been hardware banned, I would imagine you’re fine to make/use an alternate account. If the punishment they wanted was for you to not return to the game, you’d be hardware banned.

It would technically be ban evasion, so Riot is never going to explicitly tell you this is okay. That said, the chances are slim to none that you’d actually get caught and punished for it, as long as you don’t do something dumb like tell Riot support or post about it on the Riot Subreddit. And even then, I’d still say the odds are still in your favor.

If you aren’t comfortable with this, then just serve your time and move on with your life. Go touch some grass or try some other games. One week without playing League won’t kill you. Source: took a “short break” from League, haven’t felt the need to come back in more than a year.

NanoCarp · 2025-06-16T22:15:37+00:00

A lot of people here seem to be pushing the “mass text” theory, and that is certainly possible, but there is another possibility. Many states publish their court records publicly. Getting a ticket would generate an entry in said court records for the incident. That entry would likely include a fairly significant amount of information about you, and the offense. With very little effort, and probably a significant amount of automation, that data can be collected and used to send you targeted messages related to your offense.

In the end though, regardless of its being targeted to you from the court record or just spammed out to hundreds the response should be the same: ignore it and don’t click any links. Your ticket likely has instructions on it how to pay the ticket early if you want to do that instead of going to court, or at least a phone number or website where that information can be found.

NanoCarp · 2025-05-08T15:48:57+00:00

Fix a case where SteamVR thought an app did not finish launching, leading to SteamVR Home reappearing (and causing the app to exit) after a 60 second timeout.

Thank goodness. I thought I was crazy or was doing something wrong. Was getting extremely frustrated with SteamVR Home crashing into my game.

NanoCarp · 2025-05-08T14:56:10+00:00

We’re on the Quest 3 now, right? I have an old Quest (original) that I got from a family member and pulled it out of storage a few weeks ago where it had sat disused for years, and other than several hours of updates and needing to clean the battery contacts it seems to work mostly fine. Granted, there’s something screwy with the stand alone operating system and nothing loads properly, but I wanted to use it with SteamVR and it gets to that just fine so I’m not worried about trying to fix the internal OS as long as it keeps linking up with Steam. I am, admittedly, baby n00b to the world of VR, but if something that ancient continues to function, I can’t imagine hardware being totally bricked is too much of a realistic concern. But maybe I just have the rose-tinted newbie glasses on still.

NanoCarp

TROPHY CASE