Riot Games has swung the ban hammer at League of Legends players who used two in-game bugs to print free gold.
Several thousand accounts worldwide were hit with 14-day suspensions. Hundreds more were reportedly closed permanently, aimed at the players who abused the bugs the hardest.
Two separate exploits were involved, and both broke the game’s economy in different ways.
The first bug involved Control Wards, the purchasable vision item that costs gold and takes up an inventory slot.
Normally, selling an item removes it from your inventory and gives you back a fixed resale value. Once. That’s the trade-off.
The bug let players sell a Control Ward while keeping it in their inventory. So they could sell it again. And again. And again.
The worst offenders reportedly repeated the sale hundreds of times in a single match, generating thousands of gold out of nothing. That means full item builds long before they should be possible, instant recovery from a bad early game, and a lead no opponent can farm their way out of.
Riot split these offenders into tiers. Several thousand accounts got temporary suspensions for lighter abuse. The permanent bans went to the extreme cases.
The Viego boots trick
The second bug was stranger. It involved Viego’s passive, Sovereign’s Domination, which lets him briefly possess an enemy champion he helps kill.
According to Riot, players abused “a gold-generating interaction between the bot lane quest and Viego’s Passive that caused players to retain ownership of the possessed player’s boots if their inventory was empty.”
Translation: a Viego played in bot lane, with an empty inventory and the bot lane quest active, could keep the boots of the champion he possessed. Then sell them, and do it again.
Reaching that state isn’t something you stumble into. Viego isn’t a bot lane marksman, and skipping boots entirely while repeatedly selling stolen ones isn’t a build choice anyone can explain away.
Several thousand accounts worldwide caught 14-day suspensions for that one.
