League is a game that’s at its best and highest quality when both teams have a fair shot at winning, and we want to make that a reality when you load into each game.
That doesn’t happen when there are people out there who purposefully make games they’re in worse by griefing, inting, smurfing, or verbally abusing others—just to name a few.
To be extremely clear, this sort of behavior is not, and has never been, welcome in League, and if players are engaging in these sorts of things we will find them and we will restrict, suspend, and/or ban these accounts.
We know what you’re thinking, “I see these sorts of people in my games all the time, there’s no way you’ll ban them all.”
That’s a reasonable take. After all, these problems have plagued League and other competitive games since the beginning, but just because they’ve been around doesn’t mean we’re going to let it continue.
To recap what we’ve done so far this year, in patch 25.6 we started off issuing LP refunds for players that had a cheater in their games with the help of Vanguard, which was just one part of our ongoing efforts to get cheaters out of League. Then, in 25.9, we took a major step in keeping inters and griefers out of your games by improving our detection systems which resulted in 10x more players per day receiving bans for game-ruining behavior. But our work in this space is never truly done.
Throughout the remainder of 2025, we’re going to take big swings like we did against inting and griefing earlier this year and address some of the most common forms of game ruining behavior that YOU are seeing in League today.
Many of these are versions of what some people call smurfing, which occurs due to a variety of reasons, but almost always results in a terrible experience because nine people have one player much better than them making their game unfair and uncompetitive.
So over the course of the next couple weeks we’re going to be attacking some of the ways smurfs get into your games that you’ll see immediately:
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Boosting: Queuing up on an account that is not their own to inflate said account’s MMR.
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Hitchhiking: Queuing up with another account—typically a booster—in order to get carried to a much higher ranked division.
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Purchased and Botted Accounts: An explicit violation of our terms of service, any account not leveled and used by a single player falls under this category.
Boosting/Hitchhiking Detection and Punishment (Patch 25.18)
To make sure we’re all on the same page:
Boosting is a form of rank manipulation where a more skilled player (the booster) logs into another player’s account (the boostee) to play Ranked games, regardless of whether they give the account back to the boostee. This is explicitly against our Terms of Service: account sharing/selling is a hard no-go, and can result in immediate bans.
Hitchhiking (aka bussing) is where a player queues up with another player (typically a cheater/booster, but not always) as a service in order to “climb” and artificially inflate their own MMR/rank.
Both of these create an awful experience for other players in the game trying to climb honestly, and take away from the competitive League experience we want. So it’s important that we crack down on players who do this and punish them appropriately.
Back in Patch 25.13 we added a new “Rank Manipulation” report category so you can let us know when you believe someone is boosting, hitchhiking, deranking, etc. All of your reports were instrumental in helping us gather a bunch of data to improve our detection, and as of patch 25.18 we’ve begun to take action to penalize these accounts and you’ll be informed when we act on your reports and get LP refunded.
Vanguard has also helped us make massive strides in detecting when accounts are shared, sold, or botted, which typically correlates to boosting or hitchhiking. Thanks to this, we’re making progress in improving our detection models which we’ll be rolling out in patch 25.18 to even further crack down and prevent this behavior from happening in your games.
One grey area worth clarifying: if you make alt accounts yourself, and for your use alone, you’ll be safe (as long as you don’t deliberately derank it). That said, we’re working on how to better place these accounts’ skill levels accurately to avoid having these sorts of accounts get into lower skilled players’ games.
We’ll keep working to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and if you see it happening in your games make sure to report them so we can keep your games fair.
Looking Forward
We know the above changes won’t cover all the ways smurfs can get into game, but by the end of the year, we’ll have more ways to address people that make alt accounts to avoid penalties (typically through burner accounts) and people that grief pros, content creators, and influencers.
Another longer-term project we’re working on that will also help reduce smurfing is True Skill 2 (TS2) with its increased MMR detection accuracy. We started testing it in North America in March in normal SR and ARAM. We then fixed some issues and expanded testing to all un-Ranked queues in Korea last month. We’re now seeing high skill players place in the correctly skilled games in around 5 games, which is about 3 times faster than our current system. We know League’s matchmaking is super important to you and it’s important to us that we meet those expectations, and we know we have more work to do to get there. We’ll keep you posted once we have any more updates on TS2.
Expect to hear more from us in the next Dev Update in October when we’ll be ready to roll out the above changes. And also let us know if there are any spaces you feel like we could improve or explore.
As always, thanks for playing, see you on the Rift, and keep those reports coming so we can keep everyone’s games fun and fair.
