Boards›Player Behavior

Riot's 'automated systems' can now ban your account permanently, and it makes mistakes.

UniMatr1x·6/24/2016, 1:43:45 AM·70 votes·20,136 views

So this happened to me. this Monday,I was playing All-in-one all day long, welp, I did play some ranked but 3 loses in a row so I gave up. Next day in the morning, I read two emails from Riot, both stating that my account has been banned permanently due to 'the use of malicious 3rd party programs'. Please don't tell me that 'OP you sucky cheater, you deserved it' because firstly I wouldn't complain a single word for getting banned if I did anything wrong or used any forms of scripts. Secondly, check my match history here, i was playing ALL-IN-ONE (mostly in custom games) and Sona support in ranked. I highly doubt any scripts would have promoted the gameplay. So I thought, this is some kind of mistake, all i have to do is opening a support ticket and they'll fix this easily. And I did, and they replied very fast.

Your account has been permanently suspended following the use of scripts, hacks, exploits or unauthorized third-party programs in League of Legends. Accounts that are caught using hacks to gain an unfair competitive advantage are subject to permanent suspension. We work hard to preserve a fair and competitive environment in League of Legends. Regardless of intent, use of unauthorized third-party programs is explicitly against the Terms of Use, which can be found here:

NA: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/legal/termsofuse EUW: http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/legal/termsofuse EUNE: http://eune.leagueoflegends.com/legal/termsofuse OCE: http://oce.leagueoflegends.com/legal/termsofuse

Keep in mind that account sharing of any kind is also against the Terms of Use. You are responsible for all activity on your account, so be sure to keep your account information to yourself.

We won't be able to go into the specifics of an account's exploit abuse, as divulging this information could compromise future investigations. Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Tell me what you smell from this? I smell bureaucracy, dictatorship, and arbitrary. I bet this guy didn't even closely look at what I wrote in that ticket. I cannot self-prove innocence for this sick reason so I asked them to 'double check the data they collected and unlock my account immediately,' Obviously they did not. But I did closely looked their Term of Use, which has been modified recently. Article 2.1.2 says this:

2.1.2. Us.We may terminate or suspend your account if we determine, in our sole discretion, that: (a) you have violated any part of this Agreement; (b) we have stopped offering the Riot Services in your region; or (c) doing so would be in the best interests of our community, the Riot Services, or the rights of a third party. We may make such determinations, among other ways, by using automated systems and machine learning tools.

The last sentence is the highlight. 'Automated systems and machine learning tools' can now banned our accounts, permanently. Considering the two email regarding my ban was received on June 20 2016 10:50 PM MST, which was shortly after my last game that day, I highly doubt my ban was done by a human. So I replied immediately, with anger, that I refuse to accept punishment for wrongdoing that I did not do. I replied on Tuesday around 1 pm and it has been more than 55 hours since I opened the ticket. Not a single action has been taken by Riot games. Only I got another reply yesterday.

We have a Player Behavior team in place dedicated to working with these requests, so I need to transfer your ticket. A Player Behavior Specialist will be contacting you as soon as they can.

Please keep in mind that we respond to tickets in the order we receive them, so ‘bumping’ your ticket by sending us additional messages will send it to the back of our queue. This might inadvertently delay our response :(

This sounds like they're doing something about it. To make myself clear, I replied with

Let me make the situation more clear.

  1. I did not use hacks, cheats, scripts of any kind, nor did I intentionally modify my client. Otherwise I wouldn't be opening this ticket.

  2. Something weird did happen on my client right before the ban (as a described earlier). I have no idea what was going on but I didn't pay much attention to it as client crashes, bugging out and server lags are not uncommon. It is your responsibility to investigate and solve software design flaws and bugs.

  3. I am requesting you to carefully review my case because I believe it is a mistake. As stated in your term of use, a ban can be initiated by automated system.

  4. As an user of yours, especially a paid user, I believe I should be treated fairly and justly, without arbitrary and unconcern.

As of now, no reply, account still banned. All I'm asking is a simple thing, that clearly something went wrong and I want them to find out what went wrong, fix it, and make sure It'll never happen again. And I have been asking this repeatedly. It took one microsecond for their 'automated systems' to ban my account and I have no idea how many days are they gonna take to fix. It is also possible that they'll never admit that they did something wrong. Probably a single user means nothing to them while they're taking dollars from millions of. Either way, I'll keep this post updated.

48 Comments

The Unseen BIade6/24/2016, 9:19:20 AM16 votes

Riot is bad. Simple. They have messed up likely HUNDREDS OF ACCOUNTS that were completely innocent, including my own. PAY ATTENTION RIOT. YOU have messed up, YOU need to fix it. None of this "We can't provide evidence due to it compromising the integrity of our assholes". NO. Tell me WHY you banned SO MANY INNOCENT PEOPLE. They refuse to reply to me, it's been nearly 3 days. This is fucking ridiculous. EVERYONE UPVOTE THIS THREAD!

JustPacPac6/24/2016, 4:59:38 AM10 votes

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/pRRbpBPR-any-one-else-got-permanent-banned-for-no-reason-apparently-i-used-a-3rd-party-program

I just posted my situation here and yes I am pretty confident it was an automated system that banned my account.

WrÆth6/24/2016, 2:13:53 AM7 votes

Fuck. Now i'm scared,

PeelGodDamnit6/24/2016, 7:37:34 PM6 votes

If you got banned for scripting, you were scripting. In the old days pendragon and wookiecookie used to come to the old forums and personally answer ban questions. In the 6 years I've been playing this game only 1 ban was ever a mistake. The guy insulted himself in /all chat and the system caught him. Everyone banned for 3rd party apps were later found to be using things like mkjogo, or curse voice (during the short period of time between riot clarifying the rules for 3rd party apps and curse changing the program to follow those rules), or actual scripts and hacks.

And to be completely frank with you, you're an idiot if you think ANYTHING could give enough false flags to get you banned for scripting. The program injects itself into the league client. That alone causes the first flag. Next flag is if the program is using anything that riot has already identified as a scripting program. If nothing like that is found, it analyzes packets sent from your client. If there are any malformed packets, or an abnormally high number of packets, thats another flag. Mouse movements and mouse clicks are taken into account too. If your mouse right clicks exactly every 50ms instead of being completely random like an actual human, thats another flag. If you're sending conflicting movement commands (like what would happen if you wanted to move one direction but your evade script pushed you the other way) thats another flag.

This isn't like a drug test. They aren't looking for one specific chemical which can be false flagged by taking an ibuprofen. If they say you're scripting, I believe them until they come in here and say this is the first false positive for scripting in the history of LoL.

oiuytu6/24/2016, 6:21:51 PM6 votes

"Rito unjustly banned me, I swear!"

   - Every guilty toxic troll ever
Phrascal6/24/2016, 2:06:26 AM4 votes

I'm in the same boat as you my friend. I just started playing 2 months ago i finally hit 30 got 16 champions and 2 full rune pages then i get banned. I submitted a ticket as well still no answer. Since I stream and all my games are recorded since day 1 I have all the proof and they cant even give me a solid answer or proof to the issue. I know 2 months isn't long but its still time spent which could have been used for other games that i wont get banned in. I just wanted to play with my friends. I hope i get my account back otherwise this game is just a lost cause because i know for sure I don't want to re-level up another account. I'll just stick to CSGO since they seem to have a better system to stop hacking with the overwatch system. At least if I play good enough that people think i'm hacking, i wont get banned for it.

DRE130016/24/2016, 7:38:43 AM3 votes

Hello, I was in the exact same situation back in january when out of a sudden they sent me an email saying Im banned for using a 3rd party program to gain an unfair advantage, after I sent them a support ticket they responded with the exact same thing they gave you, and if Im right the next thing they will say will be the same as what they wrote to me which is:

"I can't speak to any specific programs that you may have used or why you used them but I can say that the only reason that we took action against this account was because it used scripts, hacks, exploits or unauthorized third-party programs that provided a competitive advantage to it. After I took another look at our investigation of this account, it doesn't look like this was a mistake.

To protect the integrity of our investigative methods, I will not be sharing more detailed evidence or specific details. We will not be lifting the ban on this account under any circumstances."

To this day they still havent unbanned me, after I saw that a lot more people got banned like me this week I decided to reopen a new support ticket and I'm waiting for a reply for over a day...

PrIncESsnEveRsAd6/24/2016, 9:47:59 AM3 votes

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/xI8qaH9c-my-account-has-been-permanently-suspended-for-using-3rd-party-program-i-havent-used-them same situation here man, best of luck

Palmeiras SerieB6/24/2016, 2:08:54 AM3 votes

Please don't tell me that 'OP you sucky cheater, you deserved it'

OP you sucky cheater, you deserved it

binigenghao6/26/2016, 5:12:36 AM3 votes

All the "hidden" Scripts BANNED HAHAHHAHA NOOBS DESERVED I have 3 accounts on High Elo and only got banned for Flame Your ACCOUNTS ONLY GOT BANNED because you used 3rd Party Programs just admit then you got caught.

Stasis6916/24/2016, 11:33:03 PM2 votes

It isn't just false-positives on scripting or third party support. I received a two-week ban without ever have even receiving a warning of having been reported. Finally, after mutliple days it was asserted by Riot I was "trolling and intentionally feeding and ruining games" due to a series of 3 of 4 games where I had a very poor score. I uploaded the replays and the vast majority of ppl said "THATS TOO LONG WE CANT WATCH THAT!"

If tha is the case, Riot certainly can't either. So they correlate poor scores and /ff with intentional feeding or throwing the game and whether it happened or not (it didn't in my case) they don't care, THE JUDGE. JURY, AND EXECUTIONER at the fascist kindergarten has spoken.

ShinkoMinori6/24/2016, 3:24:33 AM2 votes

Why can't riot recognize the great amount of shitty 3rd party bans complaints.

Confused Poro12/20/2016, 9:50:25 PM1 votes

...

Senegal2/1/2017, 8:38:45 PM1 votes

This literally just happened to me, I was preparing to log to my account which I spent more that $200 on to find my account banned. I have never hacked before and never will and to be banned permanently is devastating. I really hope riot can fix this because I believe it was the automated system.

Eaxen2/28/2017, 3:35:54 PM1 votes

Jesus the very same thing just happened to us. I mean, to my friend, he just logged in to find his account being banned this morning around 8 am - He hasn't even logged in to play since last week.

Ever since I play lol (for around two years now) I've only played with him and a couple of other friends every now and then. I can't really comprehend how Riot would think he used "3rd party software". What even gets that false positive check on cheating. Because he never used any cheat software.

All I know is that now his account is permanently banned, he already submitted a ticket to Riot support but reading these things here, we're not very hopeful.

And he invested a lot of money in skins and everything.

This really makes me question the policies, even the corporate ethics of Riot.

Naphlar4/27/2017, 9:38:37 AM1 votes

This just happened to me and my friend today i got pernabanned and he got a 1yr ban but the thing is we never got emails of warning no nothing, before today i didn't even kbow what scripting on league of legends was until i looked it up. Me and my friend have been playing league for a while and he just started 3 months ago, i've been playing for 3 years and all it took was a bunch of players reporting me and him because we were able to dodge a skillshot here and there. Shit i dodged jinx ult and that was hard and jinx reported me still it pisses me off that not only are they banning new players but current ones to. Riot wont do anything and im ticked about it, U've nevwr been banned before so this perma ban surpriaed me.

Gunthins7/5/2017, 4:53:13 AM1 votes

Same, its fucking bs. Never used a script in my life but i've been banned for it. It's fucking bs

theepicjoker11/27/2017, 11:51:48 AM1 votes

Annie

Gr33nV0dk42/14/2018, 7:29:00 PM1 votes

it happened to me as well just yesterday, i spent 1000$+ on that account over 6yrs and now the exact same problem happened, i only use overwolf and that one is Riot approved so im not sure why this is happening, but i have all champs and a crapton of skins on this and for it to get banned for nothing is just brutal

Dark Revenge2/14/2018, 7:40:24 PM1 votes

same here, i had an account and spent over 6 yrs 1000$+ and then it got banned for using 3rd party software, all i use is overwolf and as far as i know it is riot approved, i had all champs and a bunch of skins and limited time skins. it just sucks that they cannot correct the mistakes of their banning system and wont even bother going through check if it was a mistake or not.

Antnuts the fury2/19/2018, 11:55:39 PM1 votes

Just became a victim of this. I mine ether while playing (shut down one GPU while playing) and I get banned. IM B 5 and the majority of my games are losses lol like clearly no scriptig happening there

death wish bro1/29/2019, 1:43:52 PM1 votes

i would say something to this but id rather not risk getting a perm ban from the bots

LincolnCampbell6/24/2016, 4:25:55 PM1 votes

I completely understand your frustrations so I personally took a look into your account.

After some investigation, I can see there were hacks/scripts/exploits used on this account and we had to take action. The account was benefiting from these things, and given the information we have, I can't remove the ban on the account. This action is only taken when we find things that give a competitive edge over others.

I can't go into details about our investigation in order to protect the integrity of our investigative methods. This means I cannot give out things like what was used, or when it was used.

We take our competitive integrity seriously because everyone should have the same chance at winning. These types of things are strictly forbidden from the game with a zero tolerance policy.

We won't be able to lift this ban.

Most recent Riot post from my ticket, not telling us what was used lets our new account if we choose to make one, liable to being banned again because we don't know what triggered the ban. I think this is because of Riot being bought out by a company who probably only cares about money. You stop buying, you stop playing.

tediez6/24/2016, 11:05:12 PM1 votes

I am not the only one. http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/6uz47BtM-thats-how-riot-game-support-reply-me

Troll Armada6/25/2016, 12:11:12 AM1 votes

Highly trained Riot Scientist check every ticket prior to permanent banning.

Cpt Jack Bird6/25/2016, 12:20:02 AM1 votes

Same scenario, kept ticketing, received very inconsistent and unprofessional responses as I persisted (One of them threatened to end my ability to talk with tickets..... turned out to be an empty lie! It was funny), didn't get anywhere.

It's likely you're screwed, but remember, every ticket you send off is wasted paid time for riot. It's not even a drop in the ocean, but it's some sentimental evening.

Blanchimont6/25/2016, 1:16:51 AM1 votes

I sometimes leave my auto clicker for Crusaders of the Lost Idol on when I have LoL in the background for a queue. Luckily, that hasn't gotten me banned yet XD

Magical Zoe6/25/2016, 2:04:39 AM1 votes

Clearly, you could just sue them.

Will Work 4 Food6/26/2016, 1:39:10 AM1 votes

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/BdE2tNvF-punished-for-no-specific-reason-permabanned

And here's mine, with pictures and a full explanation

Will Work 4 Food6/26/2016, 2:09:23 AM1 votes

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/4pvm30/riot_you_have_some_problems_with_your_tribunal/

Made a reddit post, make sure to check it out

dragonarrow710/6/2016, 12:42:29 AM1 votes

same thing happend to me, the rep i got just said that the system tells me you cheated so your still band, didnt even tell me how i supposedly cheated.

Master Yix12/9/2016, 2:21:50 PM1 votes

I understand you pretty well.I really felt bad when they permanently banned my account.I never ever talked in chat and never flamed.And to be more correct I never broke the rules of this game.But when Riot unexpectidly banns permanently all my accounts i have nothing to say.Really riot?You want to lose so many players and be left as a game played only by your company and noone else in the world?If that is what you desire we shall do it right now.We can even leave this game and so you lose your popularity.So why do you do this?I personally got my main account banned.I dont know how but i got somehow hacked and when i sent a ticket to riot they answer me like this:You used third party programs and sold your account.If I would sell my account than why i would be replying to riot with a ticket to help me?I would have the money and than i would not want my account back as I would knew the response.Okay lets work together to do something about this

Confused Poro12/20/2016, 9:49:18 PM1 votes

It clearly made a mistake with my account. My account just got banned for hack/cheat/script and I really have no idea why I'm banned for something i didn't do. I'd wish i could send a mail to riot, but i have no idea what the correct mail is?

Wyvern Rider1/16/2017, 4:38:33 AM

I've got perma-banned 1 month ago, almost same situation but only with Overwolf on same time, but been told whatever the problem is, they won't unban you anyway until the year of 9001. It's just an online game, They banned you means they don't want you to play anyway, it's an alternative way to clear their unwanted players to reduce their server burden :). The world is big, and with lots of other fun games. "If you insist to unban your account, take 45 starship Avalon round trips and then you will be awake with your account unbanned." :)

--Wyvern Rider----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Never argue over a dead parrot--