Boosting in VALORANT and LoL: An Anatomy of Riot's Anti-Boost System

Late November, I sat in a small net cafe in the Gwangalli district of Busan, watching over the shoulder of a university student playing ranked VALORANT. The match reached round eleven when something felt off. An opposing player on Reyna landed three consecutive headshots through smoke, slipping out at an angle the eye could not catch, then typed "gg ez" in broken English. The student smiled, put his hand on the mouse, but his thumb had stopped tapping the body of the mouse. It was a small gesture I recognized, because I had tapped like that for years. He knew he had just lost to someone in a different class, and he knew the account did not belong to the person behind the keyboard.

I began recording moments like this in 2026, when an article of mine about Faker's tears on the Beijing stage was returned by an editor for being "too emotional, too thin on data." Since then, I learned to let the gesture tell its own story. And over nearly a decade of covering esports for the Korean market, I came to understand that the greatest enemy of a ladder is not a better player, but the person standing behind someone else's keyboard. The story of how Riot Games handles boosting is the story of that enemy.

Boosting is a behavior that has existed alongside every online ladder since humans learned to attach a number to gaming skill. The simplest definition: a highly skilled player logs into someone else's account, plays ranked matches on the owner's behalf, and helps that account climb to a higher rank. The owner pays, the booster gets paid, and the ranking system receives a lie. But behind that simple definition lies an entire gray market operating by its own rules, where pride in rank is converted into money, and where the value of an account is measured by the number displayed beside the player's name.

For years, boosting existed as a secret everyone knew. Players at low ranks felt it through inexplicable losses, through opponents who aimed with impossible precision, through accounts with abnormal match histories. But to prove boosting, a publisher must prove that the person playing is not the account owner, and that is a far harder problem than detecting cheating software. Cheating leaves traces in code, in processes running on the machine. Boosting leaves traces in behavior, in tempo, in the way a person moves the camera without knowing they are leaving marks.

What makes boosting a difficult governance problem is not the behavior itself, but the fact that it takes place in a gray zone where intent cannot be seen with the naked eye. A skilled player creating a second account to practice new agents is normal. A player buying someone else's account to climb is a violation. Between these two behaviors, the difference lies not in outcome but in intent, and intent is the hardest thing to measure in any online governance system.

Riot Games, the publisher behind both VALORANT and League of Legends, chose to confront this problem directly with a system called Anti-Boost. This is not an anti-cheat tool in the traditional sense. It is a rule-enforcement mechanism operating at the account and behavioral layer, rather than the gameplay-balance layer. That means, unlike champion balance patches, Anti-Boost does not depend on the game's update cycle. It runs quietly in the background, collecting signals, and only surfaces at the moment an account is flagged.

To understand this system, we must begin with how it defines a violation. Riot did not issue a blanket ban on all secondary accounts. Instead, the publisher clearly classifies behaviors considered rank manipulation. First is pure boosting: a highly skilled player operating another's account to climb. Second is buying, selling, or transferring accounts, a behavior that turns a game account into a commodity and often accompanies boosting as two sides of the same coin. Third is intentional deranking, the act of deliberately dropping one's own rank to serve another purpose, such as facing weaker opponents or facilitating boosting. Fourth is using a secondary account to assist climbing by carrying lower-skilled teammates to a rank inconsistent with their true level.

These definitions sound dry, but they draw an important boundary: Riot targets the intent to manipulate rank, not the existence of secondary accounts. A player who creates and operates a second account for practice is considered normal activity. This safe harbor is a deliberate choice, because if Riot banned all secondary accounts, it would collide with a practice deeply embedded in the gaming culture of tens of millions. This is a point worth noting: the publisher chose to distinguish intent rather than impose a black-and-white rule that is simple but would ruin the experience of honest players.

But precisely because it relies on intent, this system is harder to make transparent than a black-and-white rule. When an account is flagged, can the player prove it is their own secondary account, used for legitimate practice? Riot says self-operated accounts are not actioned, but the process of distinguishing legitimate operation from rank manipulation happens inside a system outsiders cannot see. This is where every concern about false positives begins.

Alongside the classification of violations, Riot built an escalating penalty ladder. When manipulation is detected, the first thing cancelled is the ranked points and rewards obtained through dishonest behavior. The account is returned to its original rank, and the owner receives a temporary suspension. This is the first tier, and in essence it is a rollback mechanism: everything is pulled back to the state before the intervention.

The second tier is for repeat offenders. The ban is no longer temporary but lengthens with each violation. The existence of this escalation rule says something the stat sheets do not: the recidivism rate in the boosting community is large enough that Riot had to design a separate mechanism for it. If every violation were a first offense, and every player were deterred after an initial penalty, an escalation ladder would be superfluous. Its existence shows that a not-insignificant portion of players are willing to return to old behavior despite prior punishment.

The third tier is where Riot sets a hard line. Account buying and selling, and intentional deranking, can lead to a permanent ban. This is the heaviest sentence, and it targets the most commercially driven behaviors. Account buying and selling creates a market, and a market must be eliminated on the supply side. Intentional deranking is destructive not only to the player but to everyone matched with them. Pushing these two behaviors to the highest penalty shows that Riot clearly distinguishes between players crossing a line and those operating an underground economy.

But the fourth tier is the most controversial part of the entire system. Riot extends liability beyond the directly manipulated account. The booster's main account may also be actioned, and teammates who frequently play with that person may also fall within scope. This is a joint-liability model, a strong measure to close the gap when boosting rings operate as clusters of accounts. But it also opens a risk zone: a player who happens to queue with a booster, across many matches, could be swept into a penalty without ever knowing.

This is the crux where any analysis of Anti-Boost must pause: the system is designed to protect the integrity of the ladder, yet it itself creates a new layer of risk for honest players. When punishment spreads to related parties, the question of whether the person being penalized knew they were violating becomes more important than the penalty itself.

Sweat on a keyboard is no less sacred than sweat on grass. A player who sits for hours climbing one rank at a time, only to face an account operated by someone else, will understand that feeling more clearly than any stat sheet can express. So the existence of Anti-Boost is welcome news. The question is not whether boosting should be suppressed, but how.

One key data point must be noted: according to Riot Games' announcement, the Anti-Boost system has flagged 296,416 accounts with rank manipulation behavior across both VALORANT and League of Legends. This number pools two fundamentally different titles, and that is a methodological problem. VALORANT is a tactical shooter, where rank depends on aim and team coordination; League of Legends is a MOBA, where rank depends on game knowledge, resource management, and macro. The boosting economies of these two titles operate on different logics. Pooling them into a single figure makes the message stronger but hides the specific dynamics of each community.

Even more notable than the number is how Riot released it. A publisher voluntarily disclosing the number of flagged accounts is a reputational signal. It tells players the ladder is being managed, and tells investors the integrity of the product is being protected. In an industry where trust in the ladder is the foundation for everything above it, from talent scouting to professional tournaments, publicly disclosing enforcement figures is an investment in trust.

But it must be said clearly: this is data self-reported by Riot, without independent third-party audit. That does not mean the number is wrong, but it does mean any conclusion about the system's effectiveness should be read with a degree of caution. When a publisher is simultaneously the detector, the judge, and the announcer of results, there is no external mechanism to verify the accuracy of the entire process.

In the near future, Riot says it will continue to scale up Anti-Boost. Most notably, it plans to add the ability to detect signs of boosting at the match level, rather than only at the account level. This is a meaningful shift. If detection relies only on accounts, boosters can move across accounts to evade. If detection relies on signs within each match, the system can recognize characteristic behavioral patterns regardless of which account they appear on. This is the right direction, but also the difficult one, because behavioral signals are easily clouded by honest players with unusual styles.

The empty stadium, and the ball telling its own story for the first time. In esports, the ladder is that stadium. When it is distorted by accounts that do not belong to the person playing, every match on it becomes a staged performance. And in a gray market where rank is converted into money, boosting is not merely an individual act of cheating. It is part of an underground economy, where accounts are bought and sold, where rank is offered for sale, and where money flows may reach even more sensitive areas such as betting.

This is why Riot's approach deserves serious analysis. It is not just a crackdown campaign, but a governance model. The publisher places itself at the center of the entire life cycle of a violation: it defines the violation, it detects it, it adjudicates it, it enforces the penalty, and it announces the result. No independent body participates in any stage. This is characteristic of the governance model publishers have pursued for years, and it is both a strength and a weakness.

The strength lies in speed and consistency. When every stage is in one entity's hands, the process can move quickly, without intermediaries, without procedural delay. The weakness lies in transparency and controllability. With no third party, players can only trust the publisher's word. And that trust, however built over years, can be shaken by a single widely circulated false-positive case.

Now to the hardest part of the story: the blind spots of the system itself.

Joint liability is the first blind spot. Penalizing teammates who frequently play with a booster is a measure that makes sense in logic, but is vague in enforcement. How many matches is "frequently playing together"? Five? Ten? If an honest player happens to appear in many of a booster's matches because the matchmaking algorithm put them there, where is the line between complicity and innocence? Riot has not published a specific tolerance threshold, nor an appeal mechanism for those wrongly penalized in such cases. This is a real governance gap, and it will become the focus of debate in the near future.

Second, the intent-based standard is a double-edged sword: it protects honest players from being wrongly banned for having secondary accounts, but it also makes enforcement harder to render transparent than a black-and-white rule. When adjudication rests on intent, players cannot know in advance where the exact line is. They can only trust that they are on the right side. And when a penalty is issued, proving one's intent is nearly impossible for an individual.

Third, all data on the system's effectiveness is self-reported by Riot. This creates what analysts call information asymmetry. Players know they can be penalized but do not know exactly how the system works, nor the false-positive rate, nor how the appeal mechanism operates. This asymmetry is a necessary condition for a behavior-detection system to work, because if the mechanism were public, violators would find ways to evade. But it is also a sufficient condition for concerns about fairness to never be fully resolved.

Fourth, there is a structural asymmetry between detection speed and evasion speed. When Riot upgrades detection at the match level, boosters will shift to harder-to-detect channels, such as coordinated groups outside the game, organized deranking rings, or communication methods that leave no trace in game data. This is an arms race without end, and no technology wins forever. Riot's admission that detection needs continued improvement is an indirect acknowledgment that current methods have gaps.

Fifth, an unanswered question remains about the role of highly skilled players in this ecosystem. Riot mentions "high-skill players" acting as boosters but does not clarify whether this group includes professional or semi-professional players. If so, the consequences would be far more serious than penalizing an ordinary player. A professional player involved in boosting would face consequences for contracts, image, and career. But this problem has not been raised clearly by Riot.

The chair behind the Beijing screen is still warm in my memory. I still remember that night I sat in the net cafe until dawn, rewatching the three games of the 2026 final, only to realize that what I truly wanted to record was not the victory, but the silence before a dream was extinguished. For years, I believed esports could self-correct through the sheer power of beautiful stories. But when I saw the student's thumb stop tapping the mouse, I understood that beautiful stories are not enough to protect a ladder. There must be a system, and that system must be operated by those with real power.

In 2026, I wrote a long piece about DRX's journey, a team that entered the Worlds final from the play-in stage, and my editor cut it down to a small portion for being "out of trend." That same month, I watched the World Cup in Qatar and realized something painful: a beautiful story can make people remember forever, but it cannot replace technique, systems, and rules that are strictly enforced. Riot's Anti-Boost is an example of such rules. It is not beautiful, it is not romantic, it does not create stories for the ages. But it is the condition for such stories to exist.

There is a question I cannot fully answer, and perhaps no one can: how can a system be strong enough to suppress an underground economy, yet subtle enough not to harm honest players? Riot chose to walk the narrow path between two shores. It chose an intent-based standard over a black-and-white ban, chose joint liability over treating individuals in isolation, chose to extend detection to the match level rather than stopping at accounts. Every choice has a reason, and every choice leaves a gap.

In Russian football, I learned to love the scars of the loser. In esports, I learned that the scar of a ladder is not in losses, but in fake wins. A boosted account climbing the ranks is not a victory. It is a scar on the face of a whole community, and that scar remains unless someone is patient enough to clean it.

So what happens next? According to Riot, Anti-Boost will continue to expand, with plans to add sign-detection at the match level. If successful, this will be an important step, shifting focus from chasing accounts to recognizing behavior. But if it fails, it could open a new wave of false positives, and then the question of an appeal mechanism will become more urgent than ever.

What I await is not a bigger number in the next disclosure. What I await is more transparency in operation: a clear tolerance threshold for joint liability, an appeal mechanism for the wrongly penalized, and data published separately for each title so communities can understand their own problems correctly. A mature governance system is measured not only by how many violators it catches, but also by how it treats innocent people caught in the vortex.

That night in Gwangalli, I left the net cafe before dawn. The student was still there, opening a new match, and this time his thumb did not stop tapping. Perhaps he told himself the previous match was just bad luck. Perhaps he was right. But if there were a system good enough to ensure it would not happen again, his trust in the ladder would not be a gamble. And that is something no publisher, however powerful, can grant on its own. It must be built, match by match, through rules enforced fairly.

The empty stadium, and the ball telling its own story for the first time. That story will only be credible if the one telling it is truly the one who played the match.