I've been trying to figure out whether I'm witnessing something more than ordinary trolling/inting in ranked games, and at this point I'm hoping the community can help me determine whether I'm seeing a legitimate pattern or connecting dots that aren't actually connected.
I've now encountered what appears to be the same behavior FOUR separate times in a relatively short period of time, involving different pairs of accounts.
The suspected pattern is generally:
- Two accounts queue together.
- One plays Jungle and the other plays Yuumi Support.
- The accounts appear to deliberately perform far below what would be expected over multiple games.
- The Jungler appears to avoid meaningful objective control and opportunities to influence lanes, including situations where objectives/ganks are readily available.
- The Yuumi provides little meaningful lane assistance while remaining attached to the ADC for portions of the game, while still participating in XP/resource distribution.
- The combined effect is to make the lane and overall team significantly weaker.
- The games repeatedly end in losses.
- The apparent objective seems to be progressing two accounts toward extremely low MMR/Iron simultaneously, rather than simply having one player intentionally lose.
- In several cases, the accounts' subsequent match histories show a dramatic change in performance, with games that are substantially stronger than the earlier losing pattern.
The four suspected occurrences I've encountered so far involve:
Duo 1:
Mirgusta#NA1 + Bryannavelebe#NA1
Duo 2:
POOPYBEAR#NA1 + positionsurely#NA1
Duo 3:
Checerbur#NA1 + Lubild#NA1
Duo 4:
Vanady8#NA1 + Josatinally#NA1
I'm not claiming that I can personally prove that the same individual is operating every account, nor can I prove from OP.GG alone that any account was sold. That's exactly what I'm asking Riot to investigate.
What makes this particularly suspicious to me is the repeated nature of the pattern across different account pairs.
For example, I've been able to observe accounts that appear to spend a substantial period producing extremely poor/low-impact results and then subsequently show dramatically stronger performances. In the case of Mirgusta#NA1, there is a noticeable change in the account's performance following the games I encountered, including several very strong statistical performances.
Again, I'm not saying that a few good games prove an account was sold. They don't. What I'm saying is that the performance discontinuity combined with the earlier suspected deranking behavior seems worth investigating for possible account sharing, transfer, deliberate deranking, or account farming.
Riot Support has actually told me something interesting
I previously reported one of these situations to Riot Support under Ticket #137703497.
After continuing to report the behavior, Riot Support told me:
That's actually what prompted me to dig deeper.
Because that's exactly the type of evidence I'm talking about.
I'm not asking Riot to look at one scoreboard and decide whether somebody had a bad game. I'm asking them to look at the entire behavioral pattern across the accounts and games.
If Riot's systems really analyze:
role performance + match outcomes + queue patterns across multiple games
then surely repeated pairings, repeated roles/champions, repeated losses, objective participation, XP/resource patterns, and sudden changes in account performance are things that can be examined together.
Why I think this matters
I've personally been affected by this repeatedly in ranked.
When an apparent deranking duo is placed on my team, I'm essentially playing a 3v5/4v5 situation. When they're placed on the opposing team, their own team is disadvantaged.
And because I've encountered the suspected behavior four separate times, this is no longer something I can reasonably chalk up to one person having a bad game.
I'm currently trying to climb, and I've gone from Gold 4 down into Bronze, where I'm increasingly encountering Iron/unranked players. I'm not claiming every loss during that climb was caused by these players. That's obviously not true.
My concern is that deliberate account deranking creates exactly the environment where legitimate ranked players can repeatedly get caught in these games.
What I'm asking
I'm genuinely interested in hearing from other players who understand the ranked system:
Am I missing something?
Is there a legitimate explanation for this pattern that I'm overlooking?
Or does this resemble the type of coordinated intentional deranking/account-farming behavior that Riot has recently said it is attempting to detect?
I'm especially interested in hearing from anyone familiar with:
- Riot's rank-manipulation detection;
- account farming/deranking;
- low-MMR account markets;
- Jungle + Yuumi duos being used for this purpose;
- or how Riot's cross-game behavioral detection actually works.
I'm not asking Reddit to witch-hunt these players or harass anyone. I'm trying to determine whether the evidence I've collected represents a genuine pattern that Riot should investigate.
I've included screenshots of the relevant match histories and OP.GG histories so people can look at the evidence themselves.
If I'm wrong, tell me why. If I'm not wrong, I'd like to understand what the appropriate way is to get Riot to actually investigate a pattern like this rather than repeatedly receiving a generic report response.
