Add report type for 'booster'

SolidBaby·10/24/2016, 7:26:13 PM·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

Schàdenfreude10/24/2016, 7:29:03 PM3 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?

Kitty Whiskers10/24/2016, 7:39:34 PM2 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.

Awkward Couch10/24/2016, 8:58:03 PM2 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).

Sukishoo10/24/2016, 9:09:13 PM1 votes

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

GrReaper9610/24/2016, 10:06:58 PM1 votes

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

RainbowIcee10/25/2016, 12:20:44 AM1 votes

Not to be that guy but... Boosted*