In January I wrote a post after long research how League of Legends is rigged. It wasn’t well received, because my claims were pretty outlandish and most people don’t bother to read charts when they can just say “lol conspiracy”. Why do I repost? Because my “outlandish” claims were patented by Activision and were reported by Rolling Stone. So my claim went from “Riot does this crazy thing that only I described” to “Riot uses Activision technology”. At this point it’s irrelevant if this usage is licensed or stolen or Activision stole and patented Riot technology, though the court porn would be delicious.

At first, let me summarize what the Activision patent declares:

it purposefully matches a non-buyer with a someone who is expertly using a P2W item to make him envy the powers of the whale and spend money if the player is focusing on one type of gameplay (like sniper), they don’t just let a whale assassin pwn him, they send a whale sniper to make it clear that it’s not the class that’s op, but the item and make him buy the op rifle recent buyers are placed into games where they can devastate their opponents so they are happy about their purchases

OK, but how do I know if a player is a recent buyer in League of Legends without insider information (just having a skin means nothing, it can be old)? There is a very good way to guess it: someone uses a new champion. You can still see my old stats on third party sites like op.gg and see what champions I’ve used. You can also look for a champion and see my stats (or lack of) with it:



I’ve never played Aatrox, so if you see me play it, after you’ve seen such empty stats, you can assume that I just bought Aatrox.

If you check the stats of your teammates during pre-game, you can determine if they play a champion they haven’t played yet. Sure, they could win it or could be in their stables for ages, but most likely using a new champion means buying a new champion. My first test contained 27 games that I classified into four groups, based on the amount of new champion users – amount of average ones (see definition below) in the team:



That’s pretty convincing that the games are rigged and the matchmaker does what the patent says: give easy wins to paying players. Then I played 298 games and classified the teammates into 4 groups:

New: using a champion he haven’t used before, or used only once, recently: likely a buyer

Good: using a champion he has 60%+ winrate

Bad: using a champion he has 40%- winrate

Average: using a champion with 40-60% winrate

I’ve found that games with buyers are usually having good players too and these games have very high, 77% winrate:



This is obvious: buyers+boosters who carry them.

I’ve found that games with no buyers are practically always lost, but I’ve also figured out a way to turn it around and it shed a light to how exactly they rig: Instead of playing “properly”, I turned the laning phase upside down with forcing teamfights early on. The rigging works by matching the boosters with players they can defeat 1v1 (the average and bad ones), causing the infamous 0/10/0 at 12 mins Yasuo, while the buyer is facing a bad player who can’t farm him that bad. But if I don’t let them 1v1 in peace but force a 3v3, then I actually force a 3v2+buyer which won’t end well for them, as the buyer who is learning the basics of his champion will perform horribly in a messy teamfight:



I tested this exploit mode in a very aggressive manner: queued in as support and picked Warwick, smite and went for second jungler. Of course I lost almost all “easy win” and “fair” games. But I won most of the “Sure loss” games since everyone was running around as headless chicken and fights happened in random locations where my average teammates defeated the wallet warriors.

Finally, lets see the rest of the games, which had 53% winrate:



These have lot of buyers and bad players. There is two explanation for these: either these “buyers” were not buyers just someone who pulled and old champ out of the closet, or az unexpected champion pick. You see, the matchmaker selects players and lanes, but not champions. So they can assume, based on statistics that if they place Joe mid, he’ll likely play Katarina and wins, so they place him as booster. But Joe feels like playing LeBlanc today and he isn’t that good, so he can’t roflstomp.

Anyway, see it for yourself! Pull up the stats of your teammates and watch how the zero-experience, new champion teammate predicts victory. Or buy one yourself, jump into a ranked game without practice and see how easily you’ll win, despite having no idea what you’re doing.

So the Riot rigging does exactly what the Activision patent suggests:

it places someone who has a champions for a long time (but not particularly good with it) in a lane against someone who plays their counter to produce 0/10/0 laning phase result, both to lose the game and to make the player buy the counter the laning mechanism guarantees the second point, ADC mostly faces ADC and not top recent buyers are placed into games where they win so they are happy about their purchases

I suggest not to play League of Legends. Or at least demand them to make a clear, binding statement that the matchmaker does not get purchase nor asset ownership info as input, just MMR and preferred lanes.

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Update: I made a reddit link for this post and it got shadowbanned fast. It’s still there if you look by the link, but you can’t see it on /new:



If they’d consider it trolling, they’d just ban it openly and give me timeout from their subreddit. They know it’s true and have to be buried. Spread the word, link it, tweet it, contact journalists! We are talking about the single biggest seller video game that poses as an e-sport, but actually just a rigged moneygrab.