/dev: Account Linking and Streamer Mode

We recently rolled out changes to reduce the number of smurfs in League because we believe League is at its best when both teams have a fair shot at winning. That isn’t possible when some players try to ruin games for everyone else.

To recap what we’ve done so far this year, in patch 25.6 we started off issuing LP refunds for players that had a cheater in their games with the help of Vanguard, which was just one part of our ongoing efforts to get cheaters out of League. Then, in 25.9, we took a major step in keeping inters and griefers out of your games by improving our detection systems which resulted in 10x more players per day receiving bans for game-ruining behavior. Our Behavioral Systems team continues to expand and refine those detections based on game data and your feedback.

In the last Dev Update, we shared our plans to address certain forms of smurfing like boosting and hitchhiking, as well as banning botted and shared accounts. In 25.18, which came out on September 9th, we began to implement those plans.

But this patch doesn’t mark the end of our work in this space. Before the end of this year, we will release two more projects aimed at improving the quality of games of League of Legends. The first one, which will land in 25.23, is a system that links alt accounts to main accounts, which we will use to link penalties across accounts that share an owner. The second one, coming out in 25.20, is a new and improved streamer mode that will allow players to hide all of their uniquely identifying information from their lobby. Our work in this space is never truly done, so expect to continue to hear from us more on these topics in the future.

If you have any questions as you’re going through this blog, make sure you also check out our Account Penalties and Enforcement FAQ where we answer many of the commonly asked questions we’ve gotten from players on these and similar topics.

Botted Account Banwave

In our last dev blog, we wrote:

Vanguard has also helped us make massive strides in detecting when accounts are shared, sold, or botted, which typically correlates to boosting or hitchhiking. Thanks to this, we’re making progress in improving our detection models which we’ll be rolling out in patch 25.18 to even further crack down and prevent this behavior from happening in your games.

Part of what Vanguard has helped us do, through a combination of hardware and behavioral data, is identify accounts that were originally botted and subsequently sold or shared. We are in the process of banning many of those accounts, all of which have broken our terms of service.

The reason we are taking more time on this is because we don’t want to permaban every single player who has ever bought an account. Additionally, we want to make sure we have time to evaluate how players have engaged with botted accounts, how many botted accounts they have, and their transgression histories before finalizing a full list of accounts to be banned here. There are many players who have abused botted accounts to smurf or ruin games, and they absolutely deserve to get banned.

But there are also players who purchased a botted account a long time ago, played a ton of games themselves, who have had those accounts become their main (and oftentimes only) account, and who have conducted themselves honorably. We don’t want to uniformly ban these players’ accounts.

With that in mind, this is the final warning to not buy, share, or sell accounts because, as of patch 25.18, we will be finding and banning all instances of this going forward.

Alt Account Detection and Penalty Linking (Patch 25.23)

We’ve heard from many of you that our penalties don’t always feel meaningful or effective because some players use alt accounts to avoid penalties. These players abuse the fact that League is free to play by making (or buying) multiple accounts and engaging in various kinds of antisocial behavior. Whether it’s running it down, being toxic in chat, or smurfing on a bought/botted account, this behavior isn’t welcome in League. Until now, these accounts have been treated as disposable, with no possible consequence to a player’s main account.

That will change soon.

In 25.23, we will use a variety of hardware and behavioral data points to link a player’s identity across their accounts, with the end goal of actively applying all penalties across all linked accounts in situations where we’re able to confidently link them together.

That will mean that penalties incurred on one account will be treated as though they happened on each account where we are confident they’re the same person.

We understand that players may have concerns about the accuracy of our alt account detection, given the potential consequences of having a punishment linked from another account. We want to reassure you that we’re taking the time to ensure that we’re very confident in our alt account model’s accuracy before handing out any punishments. When this goes live, we will only link penalties in cases where our confidence in shared account identity is extremely high.

As a note, KR already uses a unique identification system to verify each player when signing up for a new account and, as a result, will follow their local policies when it comes to account linking.

Account Sharing and Selling (Live Now)

This one is more of a follow up from our last Dev Update. TL;DR Vanguard is helping us crack down on accounts that are shared, sold, or botted, which typically correlates to smurfing. And now we’re back to let you know how it’s going.

At the time of writing, we’ve banned 400,000 accounts that were used in Ranked, another million and a half accounts that had been botted and sold, and another two and a half million accounts that were waiting to be sold. And we’re just getting started here. Expect us to continue to ban more botted and purchased accounts going forward to help keep your games fair.

Streamer Mode Improvements (Patch 25.20)

While not directly related to boosting/hitchhiking/smurfing, inting and griefing in high MMR games is another problem we see pretty consistently that ruins games for players, specifically for pros, streamers, or content creators.

Sure it’s cool to get into a game with your favorite streamer or pro, but what isn’t cool are the players that run it down in these players’ games to get a cheap laugh, camping these player’s lanes, or just generally altering how you play because of a high profile player in your game. This absolutely isn’t something we’re okay with, so we’ve built an upgraded streamer mode in partnership with our creators and pros to protect against negative actions like these.

In practice, our new and improved streamer mode have three modes of anonymity that you can opt into. They are as follows:

• Hide Other Names: This will hide other players’ game names on your screen only. Your identity will still be visible to other players in game.
• Hide My Name: This will hide your RiotID and Game Name to all other players in champ select, in game, and in third party apps, but your account progression (Mastery Score, Challenges, Title, Profile Pic, Ranked Border, etc.) will still be visible.
• Hide My Everything: This will hide your RiotID, Game Name, and all of your account progression to all other players in champ select, in game, and in third party apps. If you’re looking to be anonymous then this is the mode you’ll want to select.

We’re confident this will be a large improvement in protecting our creators and pros by keeping their games fair and safe and we’re excited to ship this in patch 25.20.

We appreciate your patience as we’ve been fine tuning these systems and their rules in preparation for launch, but we’re very excited to be able to tackle the long standing issues that many of you have been giving us feedback on over the years.

Our work in this space is never truly done though, and we’ll be continuing to look for ways to level up these systems and improve your in-game experience when playing League.

As always, thanks for playing, see you on the Rift, and keep those reports coming so we can keep everyone’s games fun and fair.