Will the Black Market for Leage of legends ever go away? A detailed look...

Will the Black Market for Leage of legends ever go away? A detailed look into the underworld of Lol

Over the years, League of Legends has become one of the most popular games online. In 2014 Riot Games reported having 27 Million active monthly users. And along with users, there has also been a significant increase in the presence of “Black Market Actors” that sell almost anything they can that is related to the game.

In 2013/2014 the big thing that everyone was interested in was “skin codes”. Which are codes which allowed the user to unlock a unique visual appearance for their character. What makes some of these skins so special, is how rare they are. You might remember Lolskinshop or Aceskins? Who at one point had literally EVERY single Youtuber or Streamer in their pocket, promoting their Skin Shops. But that’s not all, there is also “elo boosting”, referrals and accounts that daily gets sold for hundreds of dollars per transaction. This article will cover the "Accounts" aspect of the League of Legends underworld and dip into why people would spend money on virtual accounts.

Riot states the following: The Account supplied to you is personal to you, and Riot Games does not recognize and expressly forbids the transfer of user Accounts. You shall not purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, or make any such offer, and any attempt shall be null and void. Any distribution by you of your Account and/or your Login Credentials (except as expressly provided herein or otherwise explicitly approved of by Riot Games) may result in suspension or termination of your Account.

So the message from Riot is pretty clear. As any other game distributor, they own the account, and you are allowing you to "use it" as long as you follow their rules. If you get caught breaking their rules, they can at worst permanently ban your account. In League of Legends terms that means losing everything, including your hard earned skins and champions… Catastrophic to many players.

You can find theese accounts on ebay, any day of the week. Today, the Black Market is filled with Actors that provide paid services, and to be perfectly clear, most of them are legit. For example, if you search Google for "lol smurf" you will find numerous Websites that provide premade accounts for (in my opinion) a cheap buck. An unranked account is normally priced around €15-€25, depending on the amount of influence points the account has earned... Accounts with old and are skins, and many champions can go for as much as €1500! Have a look at all the accounts for sale on eBay to get a better understanding of what I’m talking about. So why would anyone buy an account? Here’s a few reasons why people would want to buy a League of Legends account…

The first being, something happened to your main account and you do not want to go through the tedious process of leveling from 1-30 all over again. We know that at lower levels, people do all kinds of weird stuff, simply because they are new to the game.

The second, and biggest factor is time. If you pay to have double exp boosts on your new level 1 account, it will cost you more than €50…you would still need more than 90 wins to get to level 30. If you calculate that on average a game lasts 30 minutes, and let’s say you’re good and win 75% of all your games, you are looking at over 60 hours of in-game playtime. That’s without all the queues, wait times, and everything that follows. Keeping in mind that this example is with double exp. boosts that will cost you a small fortune. Without the exp. boosts, you will most likely spend close to two full weeks before you reach level thirty.

The third factor is that people want to show off. Some people like to buy expensive cars, or spend a lot of money at nightclubs to appear "cool" towards the people around them. The same example can be used within gaming; people buy rare and cool things that very few others have so that they can get the bragging rights and be the one with the coolest in-game swag.

A forth factor is the thing called smurfing, the concept is originally from when streamers reached such high ratings that they experienced long queues, and therefor wanted a secondary account with less queue times. This is something the gamers have adopted. They make secondary accounts to test themselves in the ranked system on a clean slate, want to have an account where they only play champion, or simply just need a new account. Some people also want accounts on different servers, because they have friends all over the world, or for whatever reason they have the desire to have more than one account. How are these accounts made? The answer is pretty simple, advanced bots that grind the account from level 1-30 in either custom matches, coop vs AI games or on the twisted treeline 3vs3 map. They avoid detection with proxies and VPN's and emulate real play pretty good. The funny part is that they actually win close to 50% of the games. Put in other terms; a person has a huge network of servers, configured to bot several accounts at once, he pushes a button, and 2 weeks later he has a product that he can sell to the public, it’s almost the gaming equivalent of printing money.

This concept is the same thing for every game, and not too long ago we read about how Honorbuddy was stopped by Blizzard. So far, the League of Legends underworld continues as normal with very little fight from Riot apart from the occasional banwave that hits as hard as a water drop in an open Ocean. The only real stance Riot has taken was when they shut down the skin code sellers back in 2014. A deeper dive into the incentive to why people buy accounts Back in 2012, when Riot decided to split the Europe server into two separate servers, friends were split up due to what country they live in, this caused a huge problem. We all know that all the competitive League of Legends play was moved to EUW, and EUNE turned into the "lesser" server. People got placed on one of the servers, but was granted a "free transfer" so they could switch servers if they wanted too.

Now, you can buy a server transfer for your account directly from Riot, based on the current Riot points price in Europe, this will costs you €17.5 worth of Riot points. I can certainly understand why a person would then rather buy a new account for less money, and be able to play both servers without only committing to one. And if he/she changes their mind, he would have to pay €17.5 again.

Recently Riot added their new player reform system that hands out 14 day bans left and right. Based on forum reports and Reddit, I can certainly see that a lot of people are getting banned.

In the Gamers mind who wants to play League of Legends, you have two choices… make a new level one account, and play games vs new players, which we all know can be pretty tedious and certainly is not entertaining. Or you can get a brand new level 30 account, with a preset amount of Influence points that gets you going for a small cost. You basically can get a brand new account for the price of 1 champion and 1 skin in-game.

I can certainly see why people would opt for an instant new account, and continue as close to normal as possible.

Let’s look to Blizzard

This is, was, and always will be a huge problem for online games. As a matter of fact it’s one World of Warcraft recently had to deal with.

I personally think the way Blizzard deals with it is pretty genius. You pay a fee, and you can get any character toa level of the previous expansion.

This is genius for a few reasons

Old players can easily get back into the game, without having to grind through old content. People can level up their second characters, without doing all the hard grind. It helps people with less time, reach the "fun" part of the game quicker. Blizzard takes a pretty big chunk of the money in the black market, and put it in their own pocket, in a much safer, quicker and reliable way.

Blizzards own character boost service, that costs roughly 50 euros. If you want to relate this to League of Legends, let’s look at some numbers. To buy all the champions in the game with Influence points… you would need roughly 450,000 Influence points. That is without even mentioning rune pages or the much needed runes. You also need to put close to 100 hours+ into getting your account to the max level. Most likely putting money into the account to be able to do ranked games, since you need a full runepage, 16 champions owned and to be level 30 to unlock the Ranked option. Sadly, you will not be able to do that with the Influence points you get from leveling to 1-30. So by default, you HAVE to pay to be able to play ranked on any new accounts. I will again bring up the argument made by the Black Market dealers, that it’s a lot simpler to just buy a premade level 30 account, and get right too business… and to be honest I agree with them! The facts An unranked and unverified account (meaning you can lock it to your own email, and it becomes "safe”) that is level 30, on any server you desire, with a pre-set amount of 30000 influence points, can be bought right now for roughly the same price as 1-2 champions in-game. Looking at how well League of Legends does, and any other online game for that matter, I wouldn’t say that the money is a problem for people at all.

My goal here was to identify a problem, describe it as best possible, and then try to come up with a solution. There is without any doubt a HUGE market for this right now. This is something that people are buying on a daily basis from both legitimate and shady dealers. People are getting what they pay for and they are leaving the Black Market shops as happy customers.

The main focus on this article was the premade "smurf" accounts, that is pretty basic, and their purpose is to save you from the long grind, they are very simple accounts that do no harm to anyone.

I am in no way condoning sales or trades of more high end accounts, I am mainly talking about the simple, time saving accounts, that there is a huge need for.

I do not condone botting! Because people are also affected by that, if they happen to end up in a game with a botter, it ruins their experience and that is also flat out wrong. But somewhere you need to draw the line between the two evils. Your personal pain of leveling up your own new account, or the fact that you buy an account that most likely has ruined others experience. The Solution The only viable solution that would remove most of the black market activities and help people solving their problems related to leveling/acquiring new accounts is to introduce a "smurf system".

If you have a level 30 account, you can pay Riot a small fee, and you get a level 30 character, linked to your main account, on the server you decide. This would remove the need for any Black Market, and Riot would be in control of everything as they should be. This also gives Riot a brand new item to sell, which they will sell a lot of! It brings them a great opportunity to generate more profits, and customize the accounts for the customers’ wishes. One thing that comes to mind is a shared champion and skin system, where what you unlocked on your main account, can also be used on your new Smurf account.

I don’t think this is pay to win, you do not gain any advantage as you have already leveled an account to level 30. So you have completed the task, this simply lets you not do it again and saves us time. Most people don’t play League of Legends to play vs completely new players at level 1, it is not fun, nor is it rewarding. They want to play vs people of their own skill level, and can do so with a brand new level 30.

I don’t say that my suggestion is perfect, I am sure it has flaws, but this is the simplest way to give the public what they want, reduce Black Market activities and make the League of Legends experience more customized for those who want it.

Regardless, Riot has to do something, and the best way to do that, is to take control and ownership over the accounts and the problem. We featured several reasons for why someone might would want this, I think it’s time that something happens, so we get more clarity and transparency around the problem. I won’t say Blizzard did it perfectly, mainly because they priced it too high. But right now Riot charges €8.00 for a virtual champion or skin, and €17.5 euros for a server transfer. I dont know how much better that is in comparison.