Recently, a major exploit was found in League of Legends (LoL), allowing players to quickly cheat their way up the ranks. Now, developer Riot is taking action and is deactivating accounts.
What happened? Due to the exploit, more and more players managed to reach the highest ranks of League of Legends in recent weeks without exhibiting the skills or achievements normally required.
Players found themselves in the highest ranks with around 53 wins and only one loss. Normally, the statistics would look quite different.
Due to the increased MMR (Match Making Rating) for pro accounts, they benefited particularly strongly from the exploit. Now, the developer Riot Games is taking action against the exploit.
Riot deactivates numerous accounts
This is what Riot Games is doing now: As the developers announced via Twitter, all pro accounts that were issued by Riot Games after January 7, 2021, will be deactivated.
All affected players must therefore start from scratch in the new season:
“The accounts created in 2021 have an MMR problem that gave them unfair (too high) gains compared to the rest of the leaderboard. We are deactivating these accounts and giving them new ones (with correct MMR).”
All players who received a pro account from Riot after January 7 must start from the beginning. So be prepared that you might soon encounter more professionals.
When does the deactivation happen? In the tweet from March 9, it was stated that the deactivation would begin in the coming weeks, and all affected accounts should gradually disappear from the leaderboards.
Players paid 200 Euros for exploit tool
What kind of exploit was this? The trick was related to custom games in League of Legends. Through it, players could catapult themselves into the Master League in record time.
You can watch how it worked in the video from Vandiril, who has previously discovered bugs and exploits in LoL:
- Custom games are not normally ranked and thus do not contribute to climbing the leaderboard.
- However, due to the exploit, those games were counted.
- Since these matches only last 7 minutes, it was possible to level up extremely quickly.
The exploit was made possible by a gap in the system of Riot Games and was discovered by hobby developers.
The tool needed for this, along with the instructions for this trick, was sold to pro players for around 200 Euros, giving them additional advantages.
