League of Legends creators strike a blow against smurfs. Riot Games introduces a way to combat experienced players hiding behind new accounts

Not everyone in the League of Legends community likes to play fair. Riot Games is exploring different ways to fight against those who choose to hide their true skills in order to bully less experienced players.

In the free-to-play MOBA game League of Legends, some enthusiasts create secondary accounts specifically to get into low-level matches and dominate. The developers are looking for ways to combat such unfair players.

Lead game designer Matt Leung-Harrison shared a simple solution that Riot Games came up with — players will have to play several matches in regular mode to unlock ranked ones (previously, you just had to level up your account to the required level):

“In patch 14.15, we're going to require that players play 10 unranked SR games [Summoner's Rift] before they can enter ranked queues. This change has been a long time coming and there were several things we needed to work through before [introducing it].

Some genuine new players use ARAM [All Random All Mid] and bot matches to level up, and we don't get enough information about their true skill level.

A certain number of them are also alt accounts [players already familiar with League of Legends creating secondary accounts], which we would like to place at their true skill level rather than mistakenly placing them too low, [where they could] stomp everyone on their way up.

We remain committed to auditing accounts that are leveled and change hands for things like leveling / account selling via Vanguard, etc.

We will also be looking out for accounts that intentionally distort their skill in these calibration games to be matched with lower-skilled players.”

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Cover author: Riot Games. Image source: leagueoflegends.fandom.com