An unusual turn of events saw popular UK League of Legends content creator RossBoomsocks banned on the game’s PBE (Public Beta Environment), and later unbanned.
The same applied for many other players. So, what happened?
Ross initially received a permanent ban on his PBE account following some LoL matches with his viewers on stream, for what Riot claimed in an automated message was ‘due to the use of third-party tools or cheating programs’.
Ross protested his innocence and initially was unsure as to why he was been banned, as he doesn’t even use any overlay apps that track jungle timers and things like that.
“Right now there’s something weird happening on the PBE that’s resulting in hundreds of accounts being permanently banned for third-party programs and cheating, despite presumably nobody actually doing any of these things,” RossBoomsocks originally said in this first YouTube video on the permaban.
“I truly believe Riot will rectify this eventually and unban all the people who didn’t deserve to be banned.”
Ross was right – in an update video RossBoomsocks said that the PBE bans were due to a spell incorrectly causing Riot’s anti-cheat to flag, when it shouldn’t have. It’s not clear what the spell was, but it seems there was some janky code causing players to get banned from the PBE.
It’s all fixed now though, RossBoomsocks and other players are being unbanned, and they are able to play safely on the PBE once again.
Some suggested the bans were happening due to some sort of bug around new League of Legends tank item Heartsteel, with players on the PBE building that item (or being in a game where others built it) reporting they were later banned. But that proved not to be the case.
‘It was a false trigger, [the bans] were not due to Heartsteel, it was a spell causing anti-cheat to flag.’
RossBoomsocks
Weirdly, one user was told by Riot it was against the rules to cheat and use hacks in Valorant – wrong game, Riot!
Ross added: “It was a false trigger, [the bans] were not due to Heartsteel, it was a spell causing anti-cheat to flag. It wasn’t due to people running third-party apps and had nothing to do with Valorant and Vanguard. It was someone at Riot making a boo-boo about some spell coding. I’m not privvy as to what spell it was, but I’m informed it’s been fixed already.”
Before the reason was discovered for the bans, Ross also dug up a Reddit thread where dozens of people were experiencing similar random bans on the LoL PBE, and Riot said it was looking into the situation.
Around this time last year, RossBoomsocks launched a cosplay set for Halloween.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
