Riot’s Vanguard flags nearly 300,000 boosting accounts

Riot Games’ Vanguard anti-cheat has flagged and taken action on 296,416 accounts for boosting and rank manipulation across League of Legends and Valorant, the company wrote on social media. The total covers accounts identified as receiving help from higher-ranked players or having their competitive rank artificially advanced.

Vanguard’s boosting detection was extended from League to Valorant earlier this summer, and enforcement actions have been rolling out since. The system detects when a much higher-ranked player logs into another person’s account to raise its competitive rank and identifies “hitchhikers” — players who benefit from a booster while continuing to play on their own accounts.

Penalties depend on the violation and include rank removal, temporary suspensions and permanent bans. Riot noted not every flagged account received a permanent ban and did not provide a breakdown of how many accounts received each type of penalty.

Riot allows players to keep alternate accounts for practice, experimenting with champions or agents, protecting a main account’s rank, or playing with friends at different skill levels. The company draws a line between those uses and illicit boosting.

In June Riot announced an optional on-demand mode for Vanguard on PCs that meet its security requirements. In that mode, Vanguard’s driver starts when a Riot game launches rather than running at system startup. Riot wrote the feature should help address newer exploits, including kernel-level cheats that run with deep system access.

Riot added the on-demand features are voluntary for now, while extra checks for players who reach the highest competitive ranks are under consideration. The company stated it will continue updating Vanguard and its detection methods as new cheat techniques appear.

Cheat’s chief executive, Phillip “MirageOfPenguins” Koskinas, commented: “The point of human competition is to compete against other, imperfect humans, and our imperfections are exactly what makes it a sport.”

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