Boards›Player Behavior

Boosting [Someone at Riot please notice this]

Griseous·7/16/2018, 9:44:58 PM·0 votes·3,092 views

Riot, please implement a system that does a better job at stopping/slowing ELO boosters. My idea is to incorporate something like an IP restriction. There are ways around everything, but it could at least inhibit how rampant "smurfing" currently is. Also, why not limit those with the same IP address? Accounts sharing the same IP address could earn far less LP. Losing would have more of an impact and grant a lower payout giving the booster and boostee less incentive to rank together. The question then becomes, what about those who play their same accounts under different IP addresses? Give an IP change a cooldown, like a week. So let's say Brandy Bronzefive suddenly logs in to her account in Detroit, when she's used to playing in Seattle, block her from ranked for a week until her account adapts to the new location.

PS. I'm sure there are things I haven't considered or even acknowledged but I'm sure there are remedies for them as well.

Personal Thoughts: Taking ranked seriously, being dedicated and applying all the experience you've accumulated during your climb for your tier just to wind up wasting 30 minutes of your life and losing all the hard earned LP you made almost an hour before that game to be all for nothing because some a**hole wants to beat up kids is not only tilting, but it ruins the climbing experience for everyone.

  • Thanks for reading.

17 Comments

RiotBazerka7/16/2018, 9:56:15 PM10 votes

The comments responding to this are all calling out good questions that need to be answered. Also FWIW I'm pretty sure we do have account login and IP tracking systems. Thats why boosters use VPN's to hide their IP addresses. I know very little about cyber security, but I believe that VPN's are extremely tricky to overcome (someone check that)

MrFawknSunshine7/16/2018, 9:58:14 PM7 votes

well what if more then 1 person lives in a house who share an IP and both play league ?

TheEvilQueen1357/16/2018, 11:34:19 PM6 votes

there is a gaming cafe with their own computers in the city near me, I would hate it and i'm sure others would hate it too, if we got penalized for playing there rather than on our usual computers.also college students that might fly home frequently would be hurt by this as well because their locations change?

mærk7/16/2018, 9:46:34 PM4 votes

The idea is good but easily is flawed. What if you're flying over to visit a relative and happen to play on their IP Address, does that mean you're getting boosted?

Not to sound like I am against what you're saying but some people perform better in a different environment. I for example play a really good Katarina when I am tipsy/drunk.

TrulyBland7/17/2018, 11:32:41 AM2 votes

Give an IP change a cooldown, like a week.

That would mean that people with dynamic IPs and a forced 24h disconnect can play only one day a week. And this is the default in Germany (don't know about other countries) [Edit: Apparently it's not really the default anymore, still fairly common though]. Paying additional cash every month just to get a static IP in order to play LoL doesn't really seem very sensible either. And since you want to also heavily penalize people who play on the same network, playing from a larger network with a static IP (like a university hotspot) is not an option either.

That alone means you are at the very least highly inconveniencing by my estimate 16.7% of EUW players, which is a respectable 4.1% of all LoL players. I'd say it's not unlikely that the vast majority of those players will no longer have any interest in ranked anymore at all.

Now add to that everybody with a dynamic IP address who doesn't have a forced disconnect, but who occasionally has trouble with their router, needing to reset it. People who are forced to travel a lot for their job (or essentially live in two places) who might want to play during the week and on the weekends.

The list of innocent players that such a change would effectively drive away from ranked is virtually endless. In my honest opinion, this wouldn't help ranked, this would kill it.

hi ìm groot7/16/2018, 10:55:51 PM1 votes

Not sure if you're talking about boosters or smurfs. You say one but then reference the other. If you want to make it so smurf accounts rank up slower because they share an IP with another account, outside of the issue that an IP is not linked to an account, it would just make it so peoples smurfs stay in lower elos longer. Right now if a player is better than the elo they're in by such a wide margin as to call it "ruining the game", they won't stay in that elo long enough to disrupt many games. Infact most of this just comes from people having good games, and you just assume they're smurfs. Gold's aren't that much better than silvers, and plats make up 5-7% while diamonds 2-1%. Even if they're all smurfing at the same time there's not enough of them to have that big an impact on silver and lower games.