Anti-Boost: Riot Games and the Cleanup of 296,416 Accounts Across VALORANT and League of Legends

At 11 p.m. at a small internet cafe in North Jakarta, I sat behind a seventeen-year-old boy preparing for his final ranked push of the season. He opened VALORANT, adjusted his posture, then turned to me: "Just watch me play and you'll know if I'm the one playing or someone else is playing for me." I did not answer. I only wrote one line in my worn notebook: the line between a player and a hired hand is thinner than we think. That night I carried home a question about trust — something every ranked ladder quietly borrows from its players and never gives back. Two weeks later, Riot Games announced a number that shook the community: 296,416 accounts had been actioned for rank manipulation across VALORANT and League of Legends. Behind that number sits Anti-Boost, the enforcement machine the company built to clean up the ranked arena. Over years of watching ranked matches across Southeast Asia, I've learned the biggest enemy of a ladder is not the weak player, but the strong player standing in the wrong place. Boosting is when a highly skilled player logs into someone else's account to climb on their behalf. The payer sits outside, the hired hand sits in the chair, and the ladder records a result that belongs to neither of them. It is just the score of a transaction. This market is not new. In Indonesia, the Philippines or Vietnam, boosting services sprout after every season, advertised openly on social media and in chat groups. Buyers are usually players who want a pretty rank badge, or who want to touch a milestone their own hands cannot reach. Attached to it is a whole ecosystem: account trading, intentional deranking for rewards, and smurf accounts used to face weaker opponents. Behind those transactions runs money into gray channels, sometimes brushing against betting-adjacent territory. The problem is that a ladder is not just entertainment. It is a measuring stick, a track record, a ticket for teams scouting young talent. When an account climbs on someone else's money, the entire system reads the player wrong. A young talent who climbs honestly, step by step, can be overshadowed by a name bought with cash. That is why I believe a ladder's health determines the health of the entire esports scene behind it. Riot Games understands this. Anti-Boost is their answer. Anti-Boost does not ban having multiple accounts. This is the most delicate point in how Riot defines the rules. A person who self-creates and self-operates multiple accounts is normal — every gamer has alts for fun. What Anti-Boost targets is the intent to manipulate rank, not the existence of an alt account. That is an intent-based standard, far harder to apply than a bright line. But it is also fairer, because it does not sweep everyone up together. Penalties are designed in four tiers. Tier one: upon detection, ranked points and rewards gained from cheating are cancelled, the account is returned to its original rank, and a temporary suspension follows. Tier two: repeat offenses bring longer bans. Tier three: account buying and selling or intentional deranking can lead to a permanent ban. Tier four, and the most controversial: joint liability. Under this mechanism, not only the manipulated account is actioned. The booster's main account, and even players who frequently queue with that booster, may also be actioned. Riot calls it cleaning up at the root. The community calls it a gray zone. Notably, the system is reactive with rollback, not purely preventive. That means there is always a lag between when manipulation happens and when it is cleaned up. Riot also says it will expand Anti-Boost going forward and is developing the ability to detect boosting signs at match level, based on behavioral signatures rather than player reports alone. On governance, Riot holds all authority: it is both detector and adjudicator. No independent appeals body is mentioned in the announcement. For a system operating across two titles with tens of millions of monthly players, concentrating power like that is operationally sensible, but it is also something to watch over the long run. But I do not want to read the 296,416 figure as a total victory. That number is a cumulative total, not a trend. It says how many accounts have been actioned, not whether enforcement pace is rising or falling. The claim that Riot is tightening its grip is the author's inference, not a fact the figure proves. To establish a trend, we would need a baseline for comparison, and the announcement provides none. Second, that number is self-reported by Riot, unaudited by any independent body. That does not mean it is wrong. It only means we are trusting one side's account, and in this industry, one side's account has never been raw data. Third, and this troubles me most: the joint-liability clause. When penalties can reach players who frequently queue with a booster, we open a risk zone for the unwitting. Two friends who climb together every night, one honest, one secretly a booster — the honest one could be swept up without knowing who they were sitting next to. The announcement names no appeal mechanism for that case, nor any threshold for what counts as frequently queueing. That silence deserves more attention than the number itself. Finally, the intent-based standard is both a strength and a weakness. It protects genuine players from collateral damage, but it is also hard to make transparent. When a verdict depends on reading intent, a sense of injustice can arise from cases where players do not understand why they were actioned. A system built on behavioral signatures carries an additional structural risk: it can never absolutely prove who sits behind the keyboard. And I still remember a line I once wrote in my notebook: There are matches that need no one to remember the score, only someone to remember they once stood there. With a ladder, the reverse is also true — it only means something when we trust that whoever stands on each rung truly stood there. Players do not need a perfect ladder. They need a ladder they believe in. That trust is not built by one number published each season, but by transparency in exactly the hardest places: when someone is wrongly punished, when a friend is swept up for sitting next to the wrong person, when an intent-based verdict needs explaining. Anti-Boost cleans the ranked arena, but what it truly touches is the trust of the person in front of the screen. A young generation chooses esports because they are looking for a place to be themselves. If that place is taken by accounts bought with money, they will look elsewhere. On the final night of the season at that North Jakarta internet cafe, the seventeen-year-old boy climbed with his own hands. He knew nothing about Anti-Boost, about 296,416 accounts, about the tiers of penalties. He only knew that winning with your own hands lets you sleep better. And I believe every player is trying to recapture a piece of their youth in the ladder. The job of those who govern is not to make them afraid, but to make sure that piece of their youth is not sold away.