League of Legends devs planning to improve smurf detection

Answering players in a recent AMA, developers of the popular esports title League of Legends (LoL) revealed their plans to improve matchmaking placement and better solutions against smurfing.

Online video games with PvP elements are often a victim of cheaters. There are many forms of cheating floating around. While smurfing is not like tradition, cheating using any assistance software is considered the same.

What is smurfing?

Smurfing in video games is when a high-ranking player creates alternate accounts to match with low-ranking players. Not only League but several other games are plagued with Smurf accounts.

To reduce this, the developers said they will introduce new tools with better tracking of secondary Smurf accounts. This will also help in people who want to play on a secondary account by matching them with same-level players.

“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,” the devs wrote while answering.

Better queue placements

The team is also working on ways to create a better placement queue. This will help players looking for a match queue for the first time be in a similar skill lobby. Furthermore, the 2024 season will also lower the game requirement to get a 'true' rank down to 30 from 100.

While these changes are yet to come, all of these changes may have some significant effect on the gameplay. The development team will continuously monitor the changes, and they deceive their course of action.

Besides these changes, the team is also planning to look into the Duo queue in high-tier play in the future and also address people’s take on not being able to progress due to a 'hard-stuck' account.