Riot strips rank from 296,416 boosted accounts

Riot Games has published the first full account of Vanguard Anti-Boost, the detection layer it ran privately on League of Legends from September 2025 and has now switched on in VALORANT. The headline number is unusually exact: 296,416 accounts actioned for rank manipulation across both games since late last year.

What is actually being detected

Anti-Boost is a classification layer rather than a single trap. It looks for ranked points earned by somebody other than the account's owner: a higher-rated booster logs in, plays well beyond the account's usual level, and often queues with lower-rated “hitchhikers” to drag them up the ladder. When the system fires, the borrowed rank is revoked and the account drops back to its real rating, with a temporary suspension that escalates from three days “all the way up to three centuries”.

Purchased or ownerless “smurf” accounts get a permanent ban instead, on the grounds that a deranked account has no value in a competitive ladder. Boosters who also own a main account collect escalating suspensions on it, and hitchhikers who repeatedly party with boosters lose the rank they were carried to, whether or not they knew what was happening.

Riot's own figures put roughly 9% of daily active ranked accounts in the two games down as “secondary” – an account used by someone who is not its owner, whether shared, sold or stolen. Riot says about half of those are ordinary alternates rather than smurfs, which is why the system targets the pattern of play rather than the account itself.

Why the number matters

“Since late last year, we have actioned exactly 296,416 accounts for rank manipulation across both VALORANT or League of Legends, and we aren't even yet at full power,” Riot's Phillip Koskinas wrote in the engineering post announcing the VALORANT rollout. The wide reporting of this story as “300,000” is a rounding of Riot's own figure.

Rank manipulation is hard to police because it leaves no cheat signature. Nothing is injected, no memory is written, and the client is behaving exactly as designed; the offence is who is sitting at the keyboard. That is what makes a classifier the right tool and also what makes the false-positive question unavoidable. Riot's answer is behavioural and escalating rather than instant, and it now has a year of League data behind it.

Our opinion

Ranked play only works if the ladder means something, and boosting quietly removes that meaning for everyone else in the match. Publishing an exact figure is the right instinct: 296,416 is specific enough to be checked against later numbers, which is more than most enforcement posts manage. The interesting test is what happens next, because a system that has been running privately for a year and is only now being switched on in a second game is a system still being tuned. If the number climbs sharply from here, the detection is working. If it barely moves, the boosters have simply found the edge of it.