Riot Games Banned Over 7 Million 'League of Legends' Scripters in 3 Years

10/24/2018 04:01 pm EDT

Riot Games shared a League of Legends dev post discussing the developer's efforts to crack down on cheaters, a post that revealed more than 7 million accounts had been banned in 3 years for scripting.

Like other games, League of Legends has an anti-cheat team dedicated to removing cheaters, bots, and boosters from the game. This year, Riot Games' senior anti-cheat artisan Phil "Riot Mirageofpenguins" Koskinas said in a League of Legends post that the anti-cheat team worked with Tencent in an anti-cheat bootcamp to take down boosting services and better detect cheats. Among those cheats that Riot Games battled this year and in years prior is a form of cheating called "scripting" that lets a third-party program predict situations and make players' moves for them.

"Perhaps the most influential type of cheating in the MOBA genre, 'scripting' refers to having an external program execute inputs or counter abilities on your behalf (like aimbots, cooldown trackers, and combos), allowing for unfair, superhuman gameplay," the Rioter explained.

Using scripting cheats allows players to make almost pixel-perfect movements to avoid incoming attacks or let loose their own abilities between steps. Mechanically-intensive champions like marksmen that require a lot of moving around to stay safe and Cassiopeia are usually used when scripting, the Rioter explained, since they have to weave attacks into the movements. Xerath is also another common mage that players will see scripting, an artillery champion whose range keeps him safe when combined with scripts that let him perform even better.

Sharing a graph that showed progress made on combating cheaters over the past few years, the Rioter revealed that a ton of scripters had been banned. Targeting scripters alone, the Rioter said that over 7 million accounts had been banned in three years.

"We've banned over 7 million accounts for scripting worldwide in the last three years, with 5 million of those being handled by Tencent in China," the Rioter said. "Today, the average player is likely to encounter a futile scripter just once in every 400 ranked games."

More stats were shared that said how many times a player had to be banned for scripting before they reformed. The Rioter said that only 9 percent of scripting resulted in player reform, and it took 5.1 banned accounts "before a cheater finally launches the LoL uninstaller."

Riot Games' full post on the anti-cheat efforts can be seen here.

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