Riot Games is moving against boosters.
The figure is for League of Legends and Valorant combined since late 2025, and comes from Vanguard's own system.
Riot's blog post is straightforward "we aren't even yet at full power. As we crank the voltage on rank removal in the coming months, it is our intent that all players be encouraged to utilize the time-honored tradition of getting good as their preferred way to rank up."
Play ranked on your own account, partied only with people on theirs.
How it works
Anti-Boost was launched privately on League in September 2025, spent close to a year in beta, then expanded to Valorant this summer.
It flags when a significant portion of an account's ranked points come from a higher-rated player logging in and performing well above the owner's usual level.
The terminology Riot uses:
- Booster: a higher-skilled player or paid service logging into someone else's account to inflate its rank
- Boostee: the account receiving unearned rank, whether by paying, handing over access, or knowingly participating
- Hitchhiker: anyone queuing alongside a booster or boosted account to benefit from the inflated rank
- Smurf: an account with no legitimate original owner, purchased or botted, used to deceive matchmaking
- Alternate account: a self-made secondary account you level and play yourself, not penalised
Penalties
Boosted accounts lose ranked points and rewards with it, with suspensions lengthening on repeat offences.
Purchased or botted smurfs get banned, since Riot considers them to have no value to the ecosystem.
Repeat boosters with a known main account can see penalties applied to that account too.
Hitchhikers lose any rank gained by queuing with a booster or smurf, and claiming ignorance doesn't help.
Alts are fine
Riot announced that this isn't a campaign against secondary accounts. It acknowledges legitimate reasons: practising new agents or champions, playing with a specific group, or climbing twice.
Roughly 9% of daily ranked accounts across both games are secondary.
MFA and TPM 2.0
Riot stated that they are accelerating both on an expedited timeline.
The MFA case comes from its own pilot through Riot Mobile, which found 80 to 90% of stolen accounts had multi-factor authentication disabled.
Hardware attestation through Vanguard confirms the client is running on real, physical hardware rather than something shared or disposable. Vanguard Pre-Check is available now for anyone wanting to opt in ahead of a mandatory rollout.
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