Publicly supporting smurf, Riot received harsh criticizes from the community

Riot should have acted more strictly against smurfing.

As the creators of one of the biggest game titles in gaming history, Riot is expected by fans to handle things better than this example.

For the past few years, many League of Legends content creators came up with a new idea challenging themselves to climb from the lowest rank possible to Challenger in a certain amount of time. This type of content has constantly been criticized by fans and the community since it supporting smurfing in the game – which can be considered as cheating. Many popular streamers such as TF Blade and Professor Akali had performed these challenges and all received negative feedback from viewers. Freak – one of the famous casters of League of Legends once criticized Professor Akali for making this type of content.

However, this content continued to live on despite how many times fans show that they have disagreed with it. Recently, in the Spanish server of League of Legends, there is a competition in which streamers will race to Challenger using a smurf account. Not only did Riot Games not ban this competition, but they also gifted all the streamers who participated in the competition… a silver account. They also shared, promoted the event, and also held a prediction for fans. This act had triggered fans, the community stated that Riot Games did not care nor respect their players when they are supporting such behaviors in the game.

“Riot gifted Silver MMR accounts to Spanish streamers for a SoloQ challenge, most of them are Challenger/Master

Not only that, they’re promoting it and they give RP skins to people in something similar to “pickems” to whoever gets the ladder right.

During a month, +40 high elo streamers will be competing trying to be the highest-ranked, but again, starting in Silver. So +40 D1+ players will be smurfing for some days, basically hosted by Riot.

This basically means Riot is promoting smurfing, we can see even pros like Attila playing this. This may be good from a viewer’s point but what about people that get matched in these games? And also this will make more high elo players smurf, I’ve already seen some other high elo players who are not competing here saying they’ll also play the challenge on their own, with a fresh account (most likely bought in some website).

How is this ok?

EDIT: For context https://soloqchallenge.gg
EDIT 2: https://twitter.com/lol_es/status/1383421490779934720 also they’re not giving RP, they give skins.”

The post has earned tons of upvotes and comments on Reddit for the past few days, many players expressed that they agreed with the opinion of the post and further express their disappointment with the way Riot Games reacted to this situation.

The mentioned challenge was also promoted by Riot Games.

Besides game-breaking behavior, smurfing is also a sore problem for League of Legends in particular and the MOBA series in general. Having high level players appear at a low rank will make the game extremely boring and not entertaining at all. Basically, with outstanding knowledge and skills, that high-ranking player can completely take 1v9 and win by themselves.

It is worth mentioning here that the publisher – Riot Games again advertises and sponsors the public smurf action as above. For gamers, this is obviously hard to accept. Remember that in another MOBA game: DOTA 2, Valve has put smurfing in one of the actions that could be banned from the account. Riot should have acted like this rather than promoting this kind of “challenge”, even though it was only happening on the Spanish server.

Riot Games had once again disappointed us all, just, in another way.