Riot Games cracks down on Valorant and League of Legends streamers who promote boosting, smurfing, and buying accounts

Riot Games updated its terms of service to ban stream sniping, boosting, and smurfing, penalizing creators promoting such activities or sponsoring related websites. New reporting systems are in testing.

Riot Games has updated its terms of service to further crack down on stream sniping, boosting, and smurfs (not the little blue people).

You might often skip through and tick off an online game's terms of service agreement to quickly get to the shooting and/or slashing as soon as possible, but buried within the fine print is a solid list of dos and don'ts. Cheats, like ones that automatically perfect your aim, are explicitly banned in most games, for example, and now, the studio behind Valorant and League of Legends has added a few more "don'ts" to the list that mostly affect content creators.

In its most recent blog post, Riot Games reiterates that stream sniping is not allowed. For anyone not in the know, stream sniping is where someone uses an opponent's livestream against them to, let's say, take note of enemy positions or unfairly spawn kill foes. It's hard to prove, so Riot is now in the "early testing phases" of creating a penalty system that'll soon let you report players who you think might be stream sniping.

Things get a little juicier as Riot Games turns its gaze to "content that promotes breaking our terms of service." It seems streamers and content creators have made a habit of accepting sponsorships from websites that are built around breaking the company's terms of service. Some websites might offer boosting services (hiring high-skilled players to play on your account), smurfing (playing on a different account to match with lower-skilled foes), and buying/selling accounts - all of which are against Riot's own rules. "If a creator is sponsored by a boosting website, promotes ways for players to buy and sell accounts, or otherwise does anything that encourages players to break our rules, we may suspend access to your Riot accounts," the company writes.

For now, you can check out the best MOBA games and best FPS games if you’re in the mood for something similar to either League of Legends of Valorant.