How Riot has been removing cheaters from League of Legends

Riot has pulled back the curtain on how its developers handle botters, scripters, and boosters who cheat in League of Legends in a detailed blog post outlining anti-cheat methods.

Developers take exploits seriously, often banning or taking hackers to court if cheating software gets in the way of a good, clean match.

It's always interesting to see how devs tackle the situation, and in Riot's case with League of Legends, there's an entire anti-cheat team to combat malicious players.

As detailed in the blog post, cheating in League of Legends is described as the result of one of three things: scripting, boosting, or botting. 

Scripting seems to be the most influential type of cheating in MOBAs, and it refers to using an external programs like aimbots, cooldown trackers, and combos to give a player an unfair advantage during gameplay. 

Regarding scripting in League, The green line in the image above represents scripters as a daily percentage of ranked games played. It trends downward with time, and is statistically referred to as “A Good Line.” Banwaves are displayed on the same time scale.

But are the cheats really helping? The blog explains how the average win rate of a random sample should be 50 percent, so while scripting may still produces some kind of advantage, it's clear that there's a decline.

For example, in an effort to avoid detection, League developers voluntarily added additional delay to their own automated actions, essentially forcing them to perform more like a human. 

Scripts are also the most useful on mechanically intensive champions, so League developers are actively changing champion abilities to make them more forgiving, giving players a chance to better compete with cheaters.

Developers interested in seeing how Riot is continuing to combat cheating should read the entire blog post here.