League of Legends is a game that requires a hard grind to achieve desired results. More than any other online competitive game, there is a significant number of active players in League of Legends. As millions of players are actively playing the game, there are many differences in terms of the quality of gameplay among players. Only a minority of the players have high ranks while others are struggling in lower ranks, thanks to the League of Legends’ ranking system. For some reasons such as playing against the good players, players who have high ranks want to switch to an account where they can chill and play against easier opponents. Therefore, they usually open a second account which is generally called “a smurf account” among the community. Although this can be a good concept for such players, a smurf account can cause some problems. There are also some concerns about if smurfing is bannable in League of Legends. Let us examine further and try to answer this question…
Before moving on with the legal issues and discussing whether smurfing is bannable or not, we first need to understand the concept in a detailed way. To make a definition, we can say that smurfing is creating and playing on an account that has a lower ranking than your main account. The term is not restricted to League of Legends and has been used in other competitive online games for years. While “smurfing” can have differences slightly, the logic is the same in all games. Let us assume that you are a Master -your account’s rank is Master- in League of Legends ranking placement. You may be bored playing against Master players who play well, are highly skilled, and push you to play better. Or you may just be stressed as you are not achieving new ranks. Whatever the reason is, you have always the choice of playing against lower-ranked players by opening a new account. If you play at your smurf account, let us assume that it is Gold, you will have no stress while playing and you will enjoy the game more. It will be like a break while still being in a ranked game and grinding another account.
Surely, for some players, this is not the only motivation. Many highly skilled players open a new account, boost it to a very high rank, and then sell it afterward. This is an alternative way for ELO boosting and can be very profitable for some players. Moreover, there can be other reasons for smurfing in League of Legends such as getting some items, etc.
Now that we have understood the main idea of smurfing and how it works, we can answer the main question, is smurfing bannable in LoL: The short answer is, smurfing is safe and not bannable with some exceptions. Riot Games can easily detect smurfing and second accounts, but it does not intervene and ban these accounts. On the policy side, smurfing does not violate any of LoL’s policies. Therefore, we can say that smurfing is safe in League of Legends.
This can also be approved by looking at the official article that Riot Games publish not just in English and other languages. The clearest opinion of Riot Games is indicated in the article below: https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001259787-Smurfing
As can be seen from the article, Riot does not proactively remove or ban smurf accounts from the game. Although they do not approve of smurfing as it can create problems, it seems they did not find a full solution on how to remove smurfing.
With these being said, we have witnessed some exceptions in the past; some accounts got banned from smurfing. In the same article, Riot Games points out how they also ban accounts that are smurfing. They are kind of contradicting themselves; while stating that they are not proactively removing smurfs they also declare they would “take action” on the smurf and sometimes the main account. It is important to focus on the word choice, they never state “banning” or “removing” from the game.
To understand some exceptions, getting some penalty from Riot to your smurf account, let us dive into the problems on smurfing in LoL. Firstly, it can ruin the game for beginners. A smurfing player will play a lot better and have a greater advantage as he is more experienced in the game. This would give much less enjoyment and frustration to the lower-ranked players who are struggling to achieve higher ranks. For instance, if you are a Master player and your smurf account is Gold, you will easily outplay your opponents since they are in a much lower rank than you. This would annoy them since they have no option to counter you because they are less experienced. And the ranking system would unfairly punish them by giving them a loss.
Another problem is for the smurf accounts. If you are a highly skilled player who has greater aims such as becoming one of the best players in LoL or starting off your e-sport career, you always need to practice by playing against strong opponents. If you suddenly switch to lower ranks by switching to your smurf account, your skills will get rusty. As your opponents will not challenge you, your development in gameplay will slow down. You will need less effort, less grinding to get wins. When you are done with the smurfing and switch to your main account, you would most probably feel the slackness and how are getting behind your opponents. Even if you have the talent to play very well, factors such as your reflexes for certain abilities would diminish which would result in you playing worse. This is a very serious fact to think about when you are smurfing. So you need to set some duration amount about how long you are going to smurf. If you stay too much in lower ranks, your real performance on your main account would decrease significantly, which no one would ever want.
If you are okay with encountering such problems, the last step to worry about is Riot taking action on your account. So what should you do about this matter? Here’s our advice: Riot does not directly remove your smurf account from the game. But try not to make it so clear that you are smurfing: never grief during the game, do not play in god mode, and do stuff to harass players that are way below your original skill level. Riot would not tolerate this and can even take action against your main account! So be very careful about smurfing.
Smurfing causes problems especially for lower-ranked players. Experienced players easily outplay them which results in lower-ranked players getting unfair loss games. The more they encounter smurf accounts, the more loss, and frustration they get. Although Riot Games is aware of this situation, they do not actively remove smurf accounts as we have previously said. The problem for them is there are just too many smurf accounts. LoL is a game that has a long history and most of the active players playing today have been playing it for many years. Therefore, the majority of them have smurf accounts. If there would be a policy to remove all the smurf accounts in the game and take action on main accounts, the majority of the accounts would be affected. This would just imbalance the ranking system, hurt the community. Because of all these reasons, Riot Games has chosen the option to take no action for smurf accounts.
As players, we know this information thanks to Riot’s transparent communication with the community. In the same article above, they state the following: “Tackling it -smurfing- on a massive scale is difficult due to the number of players in League and the ease of account creation—in most cases, we won’t proactively remove smurfs from the game.” Therefore, we can conclude as Riot does not support smurfing, but since they have no active solution for this you are safe from smurfing in terms of getting banned.
The LoL community is divided into the on the smurfing matter. While mainly experienced players defend the idea that everyone should freely play on their smurf account, beginner or lower-ranked players state that they are tired of playing against smurf accounts. Surely, there is no certain solution for smurfs in LoL as removing them is not a solution. But then again, lower ranks are not that unplayable since there are not many smurfs who play on very low skills such as Bronze, Silver.
Finally, if you choose to open a smurf account do not griefing as it would hurt the community. Also, keep in mind that smurfing is not 100%, if you take so much attention while playing on your smurf account, you may get some penalties!
