Riot Games recently announced new progress in its anti-cheat efforts: nearly 300,000 League of Legends and VALORANT accounts have been penalized this year for rank manipulation. These behaviors were identified by the Vanguard system, with offending accounts having their illicitly gained ranks revoked, and severe cases resulting in bans.
Riot Games categorizes boosting, malicious use of smurf accounts, and "freeloading" as rank manipulation, explicitly treating them as cheating. "Freeloading" refers to players queuing with smurfs or boosters to leverage higher-skilled players to increase their own rank.
Phillip Koskinas, Head of Anti-Cheat at Riot Games, explained that Vanguard's anti-boosting system uses a classification mechanism to make judgments. When a significant portion of an account's ranked points is actually earned by another, higher-skilled player, the system identifies this anomaly.
The detection scope includes not only players logging into low-rank accounts to boost but also accounts that profit from queuing with smurfs or boosters. For confirmed rank manipulation, the system will revoke the illegitimately gained rank; in the most severe cases, the involved accounts will be suspended.
Vanguard will directly issue permanent bans for smurf accounts used in violations and accounts obtained through purchase. Riot Games also stated that approximately 9% of accounts participating in ranked play daily are secondary accounts, but only about half of these are smurfs with malicious intent.