The number of issues facing players who use dishonest tactics keeps growing.
Riot Games has released a new League of Legends developer diary focused on combating smurfing — when experienced players hop onto fresh accounts to face off against newcomers and less experienced opponents.
Over the coming months, the League team plans to increase penalties for bot-driven accounts and smurfing:
“Starting with patch 25.18 we banned 400,000 purchased accounts that were used in ranked games, along with 1.5 million sold accounts operated by bots and an additional 2.5 million accounts listed for sale.”
Using data from the Vanguard anti-cheat, they can identify the real owner of an account — when a violation is found, sanctions will apply to all associated accounts, so switching to another account won’t be an easy escape:
“That means a player who ruins your match won’t be able to simply log into a different account and continue trolling: the punishment and any subsequent escalations will affect all of their accounts.”
Source: iXBT.games