There are more League of Legends cheaters than you think

Riot Games uncovered details about League of Legends cheaters, scripters, and botters — and there are a lot more of them than we had thought.

The most important thing first: Vanguard, the proprietary Riot Games anti-cheat, is coming to League of Legends.

Phil "mirageofpenguins" Koskinas, head of Anti-Cheat at Riot Games and self-proclaimed banner of 85 million users, revealed statistics on League of Legends cheaters in developer blog.

In this blog, he discussed how the bans they currently hand out are practically meaningless. People who use scripts and cheats get one account banned, then buy a second level 30 account for under $2.

Mirageofpenguins provided us with this graph that relates the percentage of cheaters on games played to bans handed out. The graph states that last year, bots and scripters plagued up to 15% (3 in 20) of games. In recent months, mirageofpenguins revealed that 7% (1 in 15) games played globally had a scripter or botter.

This sounds like an improvement from last year's 15% peak, but it unfortunately gets worse. In some regions, there's a cheater in 20% (1 in 5) of games played. "Cheating isn't really region-specific, cheaters just go wherever cheating is easiest," mirageofpenguins explained. "In eastern countries, we see higher rates of scripting, because they're getting spillover from cheaters in China and Korea, both of which have region-exclusive anti-cheats and more importantly, identity requirements for gaming from their regional governments."

So, we've identified that up to 20% of games, depending on the region, have cheaters. Want to find a cheater? There's a graph for that.

Based on the data in the graph, scripters are the most prevalent in the Master to Grandmaster tiers. Thanks to their superhuman advantages, their win rates hover around 80% in ranked games. They then get placed in the "Apex" ranks because of this.

Riot K3O went into deeper detail in the Reddit discussion of the blog. When asked which champions the scripters were using, they said, "Historically, Kalista was the champion that benefitted the most from cheats, with Kalista having up to 22% [win rate] increase over her usual [win rate]. Zeri is definitely the new popular [scripting champion]. [We] manually would comb through new Masters+ Zeri players on new/botted accounts to hunt down scripts."

These are all expected champions, though, as marksman champions arguably get rewarded the most for landing skills and dodging danger. Riot K3O said that they saw unexpected champions be popular among scripters.

Thankfully, the bane of these scripters and botters is imminent. League of Legends is getting Vanguard soon, and while it isn't the end-all-be-all against cheaters, it's sure to alleviate these bad actors that plague our games.