Riot Punished 296,416 Accounts for Boosting. Vanguard now judges who was really at the keyboard, and Riot says MFA and TPM chip requirements are coming on an expedited timeline.

The Story

Riot's September 17 post puts the count at 296,416 accounts actioned for rank manipulation, and names the four roles in the trade.

Who is actually at the keyboard? Riot can now answer that for a ranked account, and it has used the answer on 296,416 of them.

The number comes from 'Vanguard: Anti-Boost, Pro-Skill', a post Riot published on September 17. Phillip Koskinas, who manages Riot's competitive integrity portfolio, wrote it. Its headline number: 'Since late last year, we have actioned exactly 296,416 accounts for rank manipulation across both VALORANT or League of Legends.' Vanguard is the anti-cheat that runs under every Riot PC game, and the post is about it doing a second job: deciding whether the person playing an account is the person who owns it. Dexerto, Dot Esports, Insider Gaming, GameRiv and TalkEsport carried the figure on September 17 and 18, but the source is Riot's own post, not a report.

The post names the trade it is after. A booster is a higher-rated player who logs into an account they do not own and climbs it. The boostee is that account's owner. Hitchhikers are lower-rated players who queue with the booster to ride the climb. A smurf is a purchased account with no real owner. Riot's own diagram calls the whole arrangement 'The Party Bus', and the post punishes every seat on it.

Riot's own account said it shorter the same day: 'PSA: Boosting, smurfing, hitchhiking… it's all cheating. Vanguard's boosting detection expanded from @LeagueOfLegends to @VALORANT earlier this summer and bans have been rolling out ever since. 296,416 rent-a-rank customers served and counting.' That post had 1,540,749 views and 5,350 likes by September 20.

Koskinas followed at 21:50 UTC with the ledger: '296,416 boosters de-boosted / 33,083,190 RR removed / 105,718,655 LP liquidated / 1 Riot Vanguard'. RR and LP are the ranked points in VALORANT and League. That is the rank the buyers paid for, taken back.

The Numbers

Around 9% of daily ranked accounts are secondary and over 70% of players own one; boosts peak at Gold in League and Platinum in VALORANT, and suspensions ran 55,000 to 58,000 a month in August and September 2026.

Riot says around 9% of the accounts used in ranked on a given day are secondary accounts. About half of those are benign alternates, and the rest are smurfs and shared accounts. The post adds that 'over 70% of players have at least one of them, even if they don't use it every month'. So the second account is normal. The second owner is the offence.

Boosts peak at Gold in League, about 65,000 of them read off the 'Boosts by Tier' chart, and at Platinum in VALORANT, about 21,000. Those are the middle tiers of the ladder, not its top. Monthly rank-manipulation suspensions climbed to roughly 55,000 to 58,000 in August and September 2026, with boostees the largest share, then hitchhikers, booster mains and deleted smurfs. The average rank gap per game has fallen in both titles since Anti-Boost, the Vanguard detection that finds these accounts, went live.

The charts mark the League beta of Anti-Boost in autumn 2025, VALORANT's ranked MFA rollout in late 2025, and the full Anti-Boost launch in spring 2026. Riot's X post dates the expansion to VALORANT to summer 2026, 'earlier this summer' in its words. After the launch the secondary-account share falls in all four ranked queues on the chart, and one VALORANT queue goes from about 11% to under 9%.

The Rules

Suspensions escalate from three days to 'three centuries', a bought account is banned 'for one eternity', and Riot says MFA or TPM 2.0 requirements are next.

A boosted account loses the ranked points or rewards and gets a suspension that escalates with each offence, from three days up to 'three centuries'. A purchased or ownerless account is banned 'for one eternity'. A repeat booster with a known main account sees that account suspended too. Hitchhikers 'receive the same treatment, losing the undeserved rank'. The buyer is punished as hard as the seller, and the passenger as hard as the buyer.

Riot says the volume is the strategy: 'by increasing the difficulty of operating boosting and smurfing products, we can drive down customer demand'.

VALORANT already 'shipped Ranked MFA requirements for unowned or shared accounts'. MFA is multi-factor authentication, a second check at login beyond the password. Riot says it anticipates 'MFA restrictions or TPM 2.0 requirements on an expedited timeline', and tells players to 'stay tuned for more news on when these requirements will be necessary and at what ranks'. TPM 2.0 is a security chip on the PC's motherboard that lets software identify the machine it runs on. Riot has not said which ranks will need it or when.

Every cell on the right is empty because Riot has said nothing about how its MMO handles any of this. The only confirmed fact about that game is that it is set in Runeterra.

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Our read: Riot has built and tested the account-identity machinery an MMO needs before saying a word about the MMO, and its own fiction already has the grey market.

Our read, and it is speculative from here. A shooter needs Vanguard to catch aimbots. An MMO needs it to answer the question this post answers: who owns the account, who is playing it, and on what machine. Gold sellers, carry services, account trading and bot farms are older than any Riot game, and the same week this post went up Blizzard told PCGamesN that World of Warcraft Forever, its next WoW, will 'very aggressively punish gold buyers'. Riot's post is unrelated to that, and it is the more specific document: it names four roles, prices each one and reports the count.

Read Riot's definitions as an MMO player and they need no translating. A booster is a carry seller. A hitchhiker is a carry buyer. A smurf is a bought account. Riot punishes all three.

The 9% figure is the number the MMO will be judged against. In an MMO an alt is a second character, not a second owner. Riot's own post says about half of secondary accounts are benign. The detection has to tell those apart in a population where over 70% of players own one. The cost is the part players argue about: a kernel driver and, on Riot's stated timeline, a hardware chip requirement. If the MMO ships with the same machinery, that lands on an audience that expects an MMO to run on an old PC. Riot has not said whether it does, and the poll below asks whether it should.

Riot's lead gameplay designer has argued that League needs the right amount of frustration to survive. A rank somebody else earned is the wrong kind, for the buyer who cannot play at it and for everyone matched against them, and this post is the studio saying so with a ledger attached.

Riot's own world already has both halves of this story, stacked on top of each other. Piltover is the City of Progress, governed by the Piltover Council, a body drawn from its merchant clans, and policed by Caitlyn, its sheriff.

Directly beneath it is Zaun, the undercity, where the Zaun Chem-Barons, crime lords who each rule their own piece of it, are the closest thing to a government. Between the two cities sit the Boundary Markets, where Piltovan luxury goods share stall space with Zaunite chemtech contraband. That is a grey market with a map reference.

That map illustrates the fiction, not a launch plan. Which regions the game opens with, how much of Runeterra it covers, its size, its era, its platform and its price are all unrevealed. The crests above are the world Riot draws on, not a starting area.

Riot has made its own case for the honest climb before, in pictures. The Climb, its Season 2018 ranked cinematic, is captioned 'take the first step and begin your climb', and every climb in it is made by the person doing it.

Yasuo, an Ionian swordsman falsely accused of murdering his master, is the one down in the flowers. Taliyah, a nomadic stone mage from Shurima, is the one running across the sand. Ekko, a prodigy from the streets of Zaun who bends time with a device he built, is the one in the green light of a chem-vat. Thresh, a specter of the Shadow Isles who keeps souls in a lantern, ends it. Four climbs, four regions, and nobody logged into somebody else's account.

The fiction keeps lists of names too. Bilgewater, the pirate port, gets no closer to law than a bounty board with a price beside each name, and Pyke, the harpooner who came back from the dead, keeps a kill list of the same kind.

Riot calls this MMO the grail internally, and it has said almost nothing about how the game plays. This post is the closest thing to a statement on how it treats a rank somebody else earned. Whether the MMO inherits any of it is unrevealed.

Your Take

What to Watch

Riot says to stay tuned for when the MFA and TPM 2.0 requirements land and at what ranks; until then, three more RuneGrove reads.

Riot Calls Its MMO the Grail Internally. Its own 39-second clip of Marc Merrill saying so passed 7 million views, and the most-liked public reply is about 2XKO.

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Riot Says League Needs the Right Frustration. Its Lead Gameplay Designer Said the Game Needs It to Survive, 778,000 People Read That, and the Loudest Reply Got 440,000 of Its Own.

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Pyke’s Kill List Ran Out of Names. The Night the Last One Came Off, He Found a Midshipman on His First Night in Port, and the City Hunting Him Keeps the Same Kind of List.

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Reported from Riot Games' post 'Vanguard: Anti-Boost, Pro-Skill' and the two X posts embedded above, with the press coverage named in the story. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.