Riot Games has recently announced that nearly 300,000 accounts for League of Legends and VALORANT have faced disciplinary action due to various forms of rank manipulation. These measures were made possible through the expansion of Vanguard’s boosting detection system, which identifies players who engage in practices like boosting, smurfing, and hitchhiking, all considered forms of cheating.
Vanguard, Riot’s anti-cheat tool, has specified that it can detect when a significant amount of ranked points are acquired by one account from a higher-rated player. This includes situations where boosters play on someone else’s account and players who use secondary accounts to gain unfair advantages.
As a consequence, almost 300,000 accounts had their ranks revoked or were suspended entirely, with some instances resulting in lifetime bans for accounts that were found to have been purchased or involved in smurfing. Despite this, Riot noted that about 9% of daily ranked accounts are secondary accounts, with only half taken over by malicious smurfers.
Riot’s head of anti-cheat, Phillip Koskinas, emphasized the importance of fair play, asserting that cheating ultimately harms the player community as a whole.
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