League of Legends has, like many online games, a problem with scripters and especially with bots. Riot has been able to celebrate great success against the bots, which is why they even celebrate having lost a million game hours in one day.
What is it about? League of Legends is a great success, but Riot is also dealing with major problems. These include scripters, bots, and smurfs. Especially bots and smurfs go hand in hand, as purchasable accounts have to come from somewhere.
Bots are supposed to level up accounts that smurfs can then purchase on unofficial sites to be able to jump straight into ranked play. Buying such accounts violates the Terms of Service of LoL.
Riot has now announced that they have celebrated great success in the fight against these problems. They even celebrate that they lost a million game hours from one day to the next. They show the impact this has on the rest of the game in a blog post.
The company also announced an offensive against smurfs: LoL adopts the best change from Dota 2 in recent years, wants to ban annoying teammates
Vanguard seems to be successful
What has Riot done? This year, Riot has implemented the controversial anti-cheat software Vanguard in LoL. Its main purpose is to help against cheaters and bots. In a recent blog post, the developer mirageofpenguins shows the successes that the company has been able to celebrate with it. Two graphs are also presented.
The first graph shows how much scripting has decreased. Since the release of Vanguard, over 175,000 cheaters have reportedly been banned. The rate at which scripting occurred in ranked matches has supposedly fallen back below 1% for the first time in 4 years.
Interestingly, the second graph concerns the botted hours of the game. Until May 2024, the gameplay hours of bots steadily increased. At its peak, these even reached a million gameplay hours per day. But with the implementation of Vanguard, that came to an end. After that, bot gameplay hours dropped to just a few thousand.
This has advantages for Riot (and for the players). According to the post, it naturally saves server costs, and it will be harder for smurfs to purchase accounts as the supply decreases. In the post itself, they mention 3.5 million accounts that were banned before they were sold.
At the same time, bans through the tool are said to have been executed much more quickly.
This is just the beginning
What is the next step? The blog post also discusses other matters. A future goal is boosting. This refers to very good players trying to push another account up with weak accounts. There are sites that charge money for this. This is, of course, against the Terms of Service.
Riot wants the detection of this to improve so that such attempts can be penalized. In the post, they mention bans for the rest of a season. Despite the significant controversy, Vanguard seems to be working for Riot. Riot also wants to make changes in the area of toxic behavior: LoL: Bad players fear being banned – Now Riot clarifies who really needs to be worried
