League of Legends devs open up about smurf combating updates in season 14, saying there are “many changes on the way”

In a recent Reddit AMA, League of Legends developers addressed some of their plans for combatting toxicity and smurfs in season 14. There are a lot of quality-of-life changes that will make their way to the MOBA in 2024, with updates, toxicity, and smurf detection being one of them.

When asked what Riot Games' plans are for the growing number of smurfs in the game, August “Iksar” Ayala responded:

“We've had a heavy focus on matchmaking, ranked, smurfs, & bots in the last couple weeks -- many changes on the way or being worked on that haven't made their way into the game.”

League of Legends is moving in a much different direction when it comes to dealing with disruptive behavior. The developers recently introduced Vanguard to Valorant in order to combat cheating. They made it mandatory for all players to install the kernel-level software on their systems to launch the game.

Hence, it won't be a surprise if League of Legends receives similar updates throughout season 14.

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League of Legends will combat smurfs and bot accounts in future updates

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Riot Iksar discussed in detail some of the quality-of-life features that the developers have in mind for League of Legends season 14. Talking about the smurfing problem, the developer stated that the game will be:

“Getting better tools for tracking players on secondary accounts and being able to use that information when we create a match. If you are a player who wants to create a new account and play normally, we don't think there is anything wrong with that. It should be on us to get you into games with people of your skill level.

“If you are a player who wants to create a new account to run it down a bunch of games to lower your MMR and smash on low MMR players, we want to detect and ban your account. We already have some tools for this stuff, but they need to be faster and more accurate.”

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Combatting smurfs is not the only thing that the developers will be doing in season 14, as they will also help hard-stuck accounts get placed in a rank tier that suits their skills the most. Riot Iksar continued:

“Closely monitoring ranked play. Coming into the 2024 season, we made some changes to how many games it takes to get to your 'true' rank (30, down from 100), some changes to how low-skill players are seeded into ranked, and some changes to help players who were in negative lp states (+20, -30 for example).

“All of these changes have potential downstream effects on the whole system, so we're continuously monitoring live data for the whole population and individual accounts where players have noted something that feels off.”

It will be interesting to see when the updates go live on the League of Legends servers and the impact that they have on minimizing smurfing and in-game toxicity.