Riot goes after boosters: nearly 300,000 accounts flagged in LoL and Valorant

Riot has decided to tackle a problem that has been entrenched in its two most competitive games for years and that, until now, was met with more resignation than results. According to PCGamesN, the company is using Vanguard, its anti-cheat system, to go after boosting and rank manipulation in League of Legends and Valorant, with close to 300,000 accounts caught up in the wave of penalties.

The number is striking, but what really matters is the change of target. A traditional anti-cheat is built to detect software: aimbots, wallhacks, macros, programs that inject code into the client. Boosting needs none of that. It is one person playing well on someone else's account, which is why it has always lived in a grey area where technical detection could not reach and player reports rarely went anywhere. Riot starting to treat it for what it is, a form of cheating that corrupts the entire ranked system, is a turning point for anyone who takes ranked seriously.

What you need to know

• Riot is using Vanguard against boosting and rank manipulation in League of Legends and Valorant, according to the report published by PCGamesN.
• The action covers nearly 300,000 accounts, a figure that suggests this is not a handful of isolated cases but a large-scale sweep.
• The focus is not on the usual cheat software, but on accounts involved in rank-boosting services and in the sharing of account credentials.
• It affects the company's two main competitive titles, which means two of the largest ranked ecosystems around right now.
• The source does not break down how many accounts belong to each game or each region, so it is best not to assume any particular split.

Why chasing boosting is a different war

A cheat leaves traces on the machine. Boosting leaves traces in behaviour: accounts that change hands, sessions that do not match the owner's history, impossible jumps in performance, connection patterns that repeat across dozens of different profiles. Detecting that requires cross-referencing data and accepting a margin of error that Riot had historically preferred to avoid, because every false positive turns into a legitimate player getting banned and a crisis of trust on social media.

The fact that the company is taking the step now, and with such a high volume of accounts, suggests it has gained confidence in its detection tools. It also suggests something less encouraging: that the problem had grown to a point where ignoring it was costing more than taking the risk. When a rank-boosting service advertises openly and finds customers without much effort, the message the average player receives is that ranked means nothing.

Who this really affects

Boosting customers, obviously, who bought a rank and are now losing it and probably their account as well. Service providers, who work with portfolios of accounts and have a lot to lose in a mass sweep. But also, and this gets discussed far less, honest players who have done things that seem innocent enough: lending an account to a friend for one game, letting someone at home play for a while, sharing credentials on a shared smurf. If the system weighs session behaviour, those habits become a genuine risk.

For the competitive scene and aspiring pros, the effect is direct. Amateur-level leagues and scouting processes rely on rank as a first filter. If that filter gets cleaned up, real talent gains visibility over players who bought their place on the ladder.

Our take

At Underworld Lordz we have been saying for a long time that boosting does more damage to competitive play than any aimbot. A cheater with software ruins your games; a booster ruins the currency used to measure merit. When an Immortal or a Master rank can be bought, rank stops being an argument in a team tryout, and the ones paying the price are those of us who climbed by playing. So yes, we applaud the direction: this was the right war, and it arrived late.

That said, we are not writing a blank cheque. A wave of penalties is a headline; what matters is whether this turns into sustained pressure or whether, a few months from now, the same services are operating normally again. And there is one point that is going to sting for the community: transparency. If Riot is handing out penalties based on behavioural patterns, it needs a fast, understandable appeals process, because false positives are going to happen, and corporate silence in the face of an unfair ban burns trust faster than a campaign like this can build it.

Content creators have an extra responsibility here. Stop normalising boosting, stop accepting sponsorships from rank-boosting services, and stop treating the subject as a funny anecdote. If the public conversation keeps framing buying a rank as a harmless prank, no technical measure is going to be enough.

What do you think?

The question we care about is not whether boosting is wrong, we all know that already. It is whether punishing behaviour instead of software is a price worth paying, knowing that someone innocent may get caught along the way. Which would you rather have: a clean ranked ladder with a risk of mistakes, or the same tolerant system as always? Tell us in the team chat or on our Discord, because this debate is getting good.