Like many online games, League of Legends has a problem with scripters and especially with bots. Riot has had great success against the bots, which is why they are even celebrating the fact that they lost a million hours of gameplay in one day.
What is it about? League of Legends is a huge success, but Riot is also struggling with major problems. These include scripters, bots and smurfs. Bots and smurfs in particular go hand in hand, because purchasable accounts have to come from somewhere.
Bots are simply meant to level up accounts that smurfs can then purchase on unofficial sites in order to be able to start directly in ranked. Purchasing such accounts violates LoL’s Terms of Service.
Riot has now announced that they have had great success in combating these problems. They are even celebrating the fact that one million hours of gameplay have been lost overnight. They show in a blog post what effect this has on the rest of the game.
The company also announced an offensive against smurfs: LoL adopts the best change from Dota 2 in recent years, wants to ban annoying players
Swarm – Trailer for the new LoL PvE mode
More videos
Autoplay
Vanguard seems to be successful
What did Riot do? This year, Riot implemented the controversial anti-cheat software Vanguard in LoL. It was primarily intended to help against cheaters and bots. In a recent blog post, the developer mirageofpenguins shows the successes that the company has had with it. Two graphs are also presented.
In the first graph shown, you can see how much scripting has decreased. Since the release of Vanguard, over 175,000 cheaters are said to have been banned. The rate of scripting in ranked games is said to have fallen to under 1% over the last 4 years.
The second graph regarding the hours of botting the game is also interesting. Until May 2024, the number of hours played by bots rose steadily. At their peak, they even reached one million hours played per day. But with the implementation of Vanguard, that was the end of it. After that, the number of hours played by bots fell to a few thousand.
This has advantages for Riot (and for the players). According to the post, server costs are saved and it becomes more difficult for smurfs to buy accounts because the supply naturally decreases. In the post itself, they talk about 3.5 million accounts that were banned before they were sold.
At the same time, bans are said to have been carried out much faster using the tool.
This is just the beginning
What is the next step? Of course, the blog post also talks about other things. One future goal is boosting. This means that very good players with weak accounts try to boost another account. There are sites that charge money for this. This is of course also against the terms of service.
Riot wants to improve the detection of this so that such attempts can be punished. In the post they talk about bans for the rest of a season. Despite the great controversy, Vanguard seems to be working for Riot. Riot also wants to change some things in the area of toxic behavior: Lol: Bad players fear being banned – Now Riot is clarifying who really has to be afraid