Boards›Player Behavior

Add report type for 'booster'

SolidBaby··23 votes·2,111 views

I played a couple solo q games over the weekend, both of which were extraordinarily one sided due to the participation of boosters. This is very common in the elo around League boundaries (like silver 1 - gold 5 or gold 1 - plat 5) because we're nearing the end of the season and those kids just really need a boarder they don't deserve so they can brag to their friends.

Anyway, I suggest adding a report type for this because the players stats are so statistically anomalous that it's usually fairly obvious that is what's happening. For example, when you have a player who's got a record like 140-155 in Silver 1 who happens to be on a ten game winning streak where they've gotten 15-25 kills in everyone of those matches (furthermore it's often on a champ they have no previous history on and their stats on the champs that make up the majority of the matches are average at best, while these stats are like "i get diamond in fewer than 100 matches on a new account"), it's very very unlikely that it is the actual owner of the account playing those matches.

Reports could be used to flag the accounts and then a Riot employee could review login locations for accounts that have been heavily flagged (just an IP look up) to further verify the fact that the account is being boosted. This would really improve solo q, because I at least, will not be participating in it for the remainder of the season and then likely waiting quite a while after the new season to play my promos.

I generally prefer soloq because I believe the matches are most accurately set to your skill level. However, in the closing weeks of the season you have extraordinarily unbalanced games due to the boosters ranking up accounts, and then at the beginning of the next season, we get the opposite problem, extraordinarily unbalanced games due to the account owner returning to play at 300-500 elo higher than they're capable of playing at.

It's really an obnoxious problem. I was planning to try and climb a bit before the end of the season, but not really interested in wasting my time any longer since the outcome of the game is more often determined by the number of smurfs/boosters on each team rather than the quality of the play by players who actually belong in the elo we're playing in.

I get that it's no easy problem to solve (you don't want to go around banning everyones smurf account that they hand leveled simply because they're smashing in the lower elos) but I think this would be a step in the right direction since in many cases there would be overwhelming evidence that this is in fact what is happening and it's really just a matter of adding a process/system to deal with it. Besides that it is a form of cheating and cheating is a report type, it just doesn't include this (and I think, as a software engineer, it would be better to keep them separate anyway given the difference in process required to discipline the reported players).

21 Comments

Schàdenfreude3 votes

We could always bring "unskilled" back :)

Edit: Woah did not expect anyone to take this seriously. Do you guys have a problem or something?

SolidBaby2 votes

That would really only come into play after the boost has been completed. It would be nice to get the people out of soloq while it's happening so those of us who actually want to play it and try to improve our skills and rank can do so with a match making system that isn't being gamed for the acquisition of gold pixels during game load.

They could even add a feature so that League records your login location and disables soloq when you login from somewhere that is significantly far away. Wouldn't make the problem go away entirely, and would also have some negative side effect of preventing someone from playing soloq when say they're on vacation but would probably make it impossible for a very large percentage of boosting to continue.

Sukishoo4 votes

Unskilled was totally worthless. It did nothing.

Kitty Whiskers2 votes

If you're a software engineer and think ip lookups would help and login location tracking would then there might be something you overlooked. It's called VPN's,Location spoofing,Ip address spoofing. Oh not to mention how your ip changes from time to time. Etc. Boosting cant be stopped like that. It also cant be stopped from lp charts either. I was s5 for like 2months because i played norms only to practice and blew right through silver after. It would appear i was boosted or a booster but really its because i took the time to watch videos/practice. Plus people have good days where they do go on a 10 game streak. However they do have boosting systems to find them its just not as reliable and boosters have ways around them. Im not sure if there is a fix. But if you truly dont belong in the elo boosters or boosted wont matter for long you'd climb with ease.

SolidBaby1 votes

So you think we should just say "well since you can circumvent these security measures, there's no point in having them at all" ? This isn't any crazy or revolutionary idea, it's really rather basic and it doesn't matter if the system can be cheated, you're never going to have a perfectly secure system for any type of computing, making it more difficult would still reduce the occurrence. I wouldn't have boosters in better than 50% of my matches.

And what you just said is just silly. You climbed silver, your stats probably weren't nearly as anomalous as these peoples. The higher the elo is, the more telling it is. When you're climbing silver quickly it is far more likely you as a player improved normally as you said you have, when you're climbing from silver 5 to plat 5 and maintaining those same type of stats it isn't very likely at all. Lastly, if they did any tracking on your login location it would reveal that you have a consistent location so even if people were flagging you, the review should find that you in fact were not being boosted.

Lastly, what you said about dynamic IP is irrelevant. You're taking the location of the IP at the time of login, it changing has no bearing on that. One day you're one 127.123.123.123 and the next you're on 127.123.123.124, both IP lookups show you as being in same location. Also, you don't have to use IP. Your browser stores some location information (your UTC offset) which could be accessed and used. Making a booster use a VPN to obscure their IP would making it substantially more difficult and may also increase their latency when playing, it would go a long way to deter boosting.

As stated, none of this is fool proof. The goal is to reduce the occurrence. By your logic, we would say "well you can't stop someone from doing a DoS attack so lets not even bother trying!". DoS mitigation is a multi-billion dollar a year industry. Nice try pretending like you know anything about the topic though.

Kitty Whiskers2 votes

{quoted}

So you think we should just say "well since you can circumvent these security measures, there's no point in having them at all" ? This isn't any crazy or revolutionary idea, it's really rather basic and it doesn't matter if the system can be cheated, you're never going to have a perfectly secure system for any type of computing, making it more difficult would still reduce the occurrence. I wouldn't have boosters in better than 50% of my matches.

And what you just said is just silly. You climbed silver, your stats probably weren't nearly as anomalous as these peoples. The higher the elo is, the more telling it is. When you're climbing silver quickly it is far more likely you as a player improved normally as you said you have, when you're climbing from silver 5 to plat 5 and maintaining those same type of stats it isn't very likely at all. Lastly, if they did any tracking on your login location it would reveal that you have a consistent location so even if people were flagging you, the review should find that you in fact were not being boosted.

Lastly, what you said about dynamic IP is irrelevant. You're taking the location of the IP at the time of login, it changing has no bearing on that. One day you're one 127.123.123.123 and the next you're on 127.123.123.124, both IP lookups show you as being in same location. Also, you don't have to use IP. Your browser stores some location information (your UTC offset) which could be accessed and used. Making a booster use a VPN to obscure their IP would making it substantially more difficult and may also increase their latency when playing, it would go a long way to deter boosting.

As stated, none of this is fool proof. The goal is to reduce the occurrence. By your logic, we would say "well you can't stop someone from doing a DoS attack so lets not even bother trying!". DoS mitigation is a multi-billion dollar a year industry. Nice try pretending like you know anything about the topic though.

My stats climbing were like 12/3,22/3 repeating as lucian when i climbed. The only time they werent good were when i was in promos for gold and it was more like 6/5. These security measure's are absurd for such a thing when they already have security measures in place. If someone were to play at a PC cafe their ip wouldnt be the same and would change so would the location. If they used public internet it would be the same and riot has nothing against either of these. What your telling me is that someone should be punished because they went to another location. On another network and logged in to play? It wouldnt deter boosting it would only cause issue's. If people are smart enough to script you think they wouldnt come up with a way to make it appear as the owner logged in? Such as forcing false packet's into the system? DoS isnt even related to this. It's not like some kid is running a javascript botnet and using it on people they met on here. There are security measures in place let it be. Besides you should be happy. You have high enough mmr league puts you with those people or against them thinking its a equal match. It still doesnt change the simple fact it wont deter you at all from climbing if you truly dont belong there. If a booster stopped you from hitting gold completely well my friend your rank is noone elses but yours. Goodluck <3

SolidBaby1 votes

My rank is higher than yours on multiple accounts and has been all season, I'm not concerned with my rank. You have no idea what you're talking about. An IP lookup doesn't yield your exact address. The internet cafe you're playing at, or friends house, or where ever else will more than likely be in at least a same city/metropolitan area where you typically play. Again, no one would care about your stats because they would review your location and see that it's legit. And yes, DoS has plenty to do with this because the mitigation measures are similar, you black list offending IP's upstream from the server they're targeting. It also is something that can never be fully mitigated for the type of reasons you stated. That doesn't mean we stop trying to mitigate it. The internet would be unusable more often than not if that were the case.

And again, you have no idea what you're talking about. The vast majority of people involved in malicious activity have no idea how to program in any language, they use tools that a very small percentage of the community has developed. You act like it's completely trivial to mock your IP. As if this wouldn't be a significant problem for a booster living in LA who's boosting people all over the country. It would be a lot of work to connect to various VPN's that give you an IP in the general locale of the person you're currently boosting. Again, it would significantly increase the effort required to boost.

And, for all you know, no one would even review your account in the first place because first you would have to be flagged as boosting by a large number of players and no one is going to flag your barely gold 5 ass as a booster. Furthermore, if you understood anything about IP or IP lookups you would understand that the review would show all your logins as being within like a 200 mile radius, which would probably be around where I'd recommend setting the thresh hold for this. Also, just because your account is flagged as suspicious and reviewed doesn't mean you get banned. Players who are reported for racism don't get instantly banned, someone reviews the chat history to confirm they in fact made racist remarks.

It's unclear to me whether you're a player who got boosted or just a jackass but given you really know nothing about the technology I don't see why you would come on here and try to pretend like you do and tell me what does and doesn't work. As an engineer who frequently works on security related issues I'm highly confident this could be implemented and greatly reduce the amount of boosting that occurs without a tremendous effort.

You could also argue something like "Well it's just as likely that you have a booster on your team as against so over a statistically significant number of matches it will even out and should not impact your W/L record negatively or your elo" and that is somewhat true, but you see it's about player experience. When I start a match and the enemy jungle is 5-0 at 5 minutes while our jungler hasn't even gotten either of his buffs, it's not a good experience for really anyone in the match. Especially for my teams jungler when we have jackasses like you are on the team telling him how much he sucks when really it's not his fault, it's because their masters/challenger booster is ruining his day and the same would happen to most anyone else belonging in the elo we're playing.

SolidBaby2 votes

Also, I just looked up your account;

Lucian 185.0 CS 2.92:1 KDA 9.2 / 5.6 / 7.3 60% 80 Played

These aren't anomalous stats at all. They're very typical for someone who is doing well on a champion. A 3-1 KDA is pretty much par for the course for someone who is winning 55% or better of their games on a champion. Your kill average is under 10, compared to the people I'm playing against who are already in gold (meaning collecting their stats at a higher skill level) have an 80+ percent win rate and 15+ kills a game with something like a 5-7 KDA.

Sorry I'm being somewhat rude but you really don't know anything about these topics (statistics, IP lookups, software engineering in general) so please stop derailing the topic with your uninformed nay saying.

ThorHammerz1 votes

{quoted}

Also, I just looked up your account;

Lucian 185.0 CS 2.92:1 KDA 9.2 / 5.6 / 7.3 60% 80 Played

These aren't anomalous stats at all. They're very typical for someone who is doing well on a champion. A 3-1 KDA is pretty much par for the course for someone who is winning 55% or better of their games on a champion. Your kill average is under 10, compared to the people I'm playing against who are already in gold (meaning collecting their stats at a higher skill level) have an 80+ percent win rate and 15+ kills a game with something like a 5-7 KDA.

Sorry I'm being somewhat rude but you really don't know anything about these topics (statistics, IP lookups, software engineering in general) so please stop derailing the topic with your uninformed nay saying.

Using IP tracking in an attempt to determine whether someone is boosting or not is not an effective method (as detailed by Kitty Whiskers).

Rather, Riot will probably try and analyze your play patterns, behaviours, and idiosyncrasies over the course of many games. If a player suddenly and drastically changes their play patterns in conjunction with a similar change in performance, that would likely be grounds for further investigation (such as a manual review).

As a side note, do try to act maturely, as few people will take you seriously if you act otherwise (read: personal attacks on the poster which have no relevance on the actual argument, colloquially known as an Ad Hominem).

Awkward Couch2 votes

I think the biggest problem you would run into would be VPN's. ELO boosting sites will talk about how they use VPN's so you won't get caught (one of the ones that comes to mind is XJ9's boosting service). The college campus that I work at uses a VPN for all of their campus internet, and I know of several other colleges around do the same. Considering most people who play this game are between the ages of 18-25 that's a significant portion of people that play this game.

While a VPN may increase your latency a bit, good players can play on higher pings (let's face it, a less mechanically intensive champ like Malphite isn't hard to play on 85 ping), and there is a load of money to be made in boosting.

Riot has stated that they would be cautious as to not ban someone who is innocent, and there is actually a great example of this. Take what happened in March of this year, with the LPL.

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/46k50z/rulebreaking_operations_exposed_in_ljl_informer/

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/45w3tn/dose_riot_games_know_the_ringer_incident_happend/

I'll let you read them for yourself, but the TL:DR is that because the Japan servers weren't up yet, teams had to use a VPN to play on the NA servers. However, because of the VPN it looked like certain players were actually playing in NA. This lead to the scandal of one team using a ringer. Now since they were using a VPN it looked like the "ringer" was in NA but they couldn't be certain since there was no substantial proof. I think this highlights Riot's position of being cautious when it comes to punishing boosters/boosties.

Now IIRC there was a time when Riot employees responded more to these boards and people were complaining about getting banned, only to find out, that they were account sharing and employees stating that a player would log out, travel exactly X miles, play for a couple of games, log out, and 2 minutes later travel X miles back to the original position. I found an example! So we know they have the technology, but I think they are more hesitant to punish without substantial proof (not to say that it doesn't happen, because we all know it does).

SolidBaby1 votes

Yeah I'm aware they have already punished people using this same method of investigation. I'm just suggesting they increase the amount which it's used and create process that leverages player feedback to better identify potential offenders. The VPN thing does reduce the effectiveness of such measures but likely by less than you might expect. The example of a college campus using a VPN for example wouldn't matter because, VPN or not, all your logins would be from that VPN so it would still be consistent. Furthermore, it is unlikely the colleges VPN would show their traffic as coming from a different geographical location.

The example you gave of Japanese teams playing on VPN is quite a bit different because they are using the VPN for the express purpose of routing their traffic from a different geographical location (as it's required to connect to the server in the first place). I'm on a VPN at work as well, but all the traffic is still going to come from Portland, OR because we have no reason to route it to some other geographical location, the same would likely be true for colleges and other institutions using a VPN.

I agree that they should error on the side of caution here. I'm not suggesting they implement a service to scan login locations and auto ban 'offenders' for logging on in disparate geographical locations in less than the feasible travel time from one to the other. I think they should simply be adding the report category so they can aggregate a list of potential offenders and then review that to effectively ban a much larger percentage of them. I mean to say this is a huge problem would be an understatement. There are nearly 3 million participants in the NA ranked solo q and at the current time, I would bet the odds of a booster participating in an ~gold 5 NA solo q match are better than one in two.

Awkward Couch1 votes

{quoted}

Yeah I'm aware they have already punished people using this same method of investigation. I'm just suggesting they increase the amount which it's used and create process that leverages player feedback to better identify potential offenders. The VPN thing does reduce the effectiveness of such measures but likely by less than you might expect. The example of a college campus using a VPN for example wouldn't matter because, VPN or not, all your logins would be from that VPN so it would still be consistent. Furthermore, it is unlikely the colleges VPN would show their traffic as coming from a different geographical location.

The example you gave of Japanese teams playing on VPN is quite a bit different because they are using the VPN for the express purpose of routing their traffic from a different geographical location (as it's required to connect to the server in the first place). I'm on a VPN at work as well, but all the traffic is still going to come from Portland, OR because we have no reason to route it to some other geographical location, the same would likely be true for colleges and other institutions using a VPN.

I agree that they should error on the side of caution here. I'm not suggesting they implement a service to scan login locations and auto ban 'offenders' for logging on in disparate geographical locations in less than the feasible travel time from one to the other. I think they should simply be adding the report category so they can aggregate a list of potential offenders and then review that to effectively ban a much larger percentage of them. I mean to say this is a huge problem would be an understatement. There are nearly 3 million participants in the NA ranked solo q and at the current time, I would bet the odds of a booster participating in an ~gold 5 NA solo q match are better than one in two.

Fair enough, you probably know a great deal more than I about this subject. It's just that often I see people coming in, claiming to be experts in networking, and talk about how easy it is to track down boosters, or implement harsh punishments at a whim of the prospect of cheating.

IIRC, there was a big ban wave for boosting after the season ended last year, and it sort of makes sense why. The reason Riot does bans for 3rd party programs in waves is so that if someone was using more than one cheat (fog of war and dodge cheat for example) the cheater and therefore the developers won't know if they got caught with the fog of war, the dodge script or both. Same thing applies here, if Riot bans all elo boosted accounts at once, players won't know what boosting service(s) got caught, or if it was an individual. Not saying I really agree with it, but that's the way that Riot does things.

I think with the report option you run into one major issue, and that is manpower. Having a Riot employee go over all of the accounts that get flagged, even if they get flagged multiple times, would still take a long time to sort through who's smurfing and who's boosting. Sure KDA and CS are good indicators, but that doesn't mean they were cheating. Getting an employee to sort through all of those reports, just isn't very cost effective. Especially when that same person who got boosted can just make a brand new account and get boosted all over again (ever wonder how Tyler1 got so many accounts to Diamond + so fast?).

The same thing is also true for trolls. It would be great if we could get Riot to go through and find every troll and ban them, but that's just not realistic because it's expensive and very time consuming. If the old Tribunal is any indicator, the community should not police itself.

duducream1 votes

Please do not use Japanese as an example, it could be a racism

Deep Terror Nami1 votes

Since your thread was deleted (I assume for being on the incorrect board) I'll answer you here;

The "Ineligible for loot" refers to Hextech loot only (chests/keys). You don't need to work that off to be eligible for Ranked rewards.

Sukishoo1 votes

Yeah I think they should have added that back when they updated the report options, it only makes sense.

GrReaper961 votes

Quick question what exactly are boosters and how do you classify them?

SolidBaby1 votes

A booster is a player who is playing on another persons account with the intent to earn them a higher rank. Generally people hired to boost are diamond+ players boosting in relatively low elo (like silver and gold, though not exclusively, you'll see boosting services offering boosts at all ranks, they're just slower and more expensive at higher ranks). You can find the service offered throughout the internet with various price scales that are based on the accounts current rank, MMR, and how much they owner would like it boosted.

Basically they're smurfs, however they aren't playing on their own secondary accounts that will gain and then maintain high elo. Instead they're playing on the account of whoever purchased the boost who will be very unlikely to maintain the elo they have acquired.

GrReaper961 votes

But then how do you know their not just smurfs? Or someone who hasn't really played rank before but played a ton of normals?

Zammyz1 votes

If they get 20+ Kills average every game on a champion that they've never played on I think it's safe to say they're being boosted. (Or atleast someone else is playing on their account)

Leon Etoile1 votes

Could be a smurf which makes it hard to detect. Riot would have to manually investigate those cases so don't expect it to happen.

RainbowIcee1 votes

Not to be that guy but... Boosted*

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