China's League of Legends All-Stars are trying to elo-boost, but is it actually Riot's fault?

China’s representatives at All-Star 2014—the entire OMG team plus Caomei, WeiXiao, and Misaya—are definitely having a good time in the run-up to the event. But they could also be headed for controversy, as a recent tweet from OMG top laner GoGoing has already gotten the attention of the League of Legends world.

Since arriving in Paris, several Chinese players have complained that the European accounts provided by Riot were not high-ELO enough to be useful for training purposes. As a result, Misaya, Pomelo, Allen, WeiXiao and GoGoing have all made posts to Chinese microblogs asking for Europe-based high-ELO fans to let them borrow their accounts so the pro players can train against higher-level opposition during their stay in Europe. The most controversial tweet, GoGoing’s, retweets Pomelo’s message about looking for loaner accounts, and then says:

Diamond or higher, we’ll level it up for free 🙂 🙂

Other players have posted similar messages; for example Allen tweeted:

If you’re on the EU server, we need Diamond and up accounts, if you have them you can PM me, thanks.

Misaya’s microblog message reads:

RTing [WeiXiao’s post], if you have EUW Platinum or Diamond accounts, PM us!

In the comments, some Europe-based Chinese players are already offering their accounts up. One commenter, for example, claimed to have a Diamond 1 EUW account with all skins unlocked and was “looking for boosting.” We don’t know whether any of the Chinese players have actually gone through with borrowing any fan accounts yet, but there are definitely willing fans in the area that are willing to take them up on their offer.

However, though it’s not clear whether the Chinese players are aware of it, logging into another player’s account and playing ranked to boost its level is against Riot’s terms of service. Regular players found engaging in these activities get their accounts banned for two weeks, or permanently if they’re caught doing it more than once. What happens to pros—especially pros who normally play on the Tencent servers—isn’t clear.

We’ve contacted Riot Games for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that if Riot truly did provide the players with sub-Diamond European accounts for the tournament, it is arguably putting them at quite a competitive disadvantage. The Chinese players are already coming from a country where major competitive play is at least a full patch behind the West (although most of them do train on the up-to-date Korean servers as well), and giving them low-ranked accounts means they’d have to slog through hours of too-easy opponents before they can engage in meaningful solo-queue or duo-queue practice.

(It’s also probably worth pointing out that ELO-boosting, while technically not permitted on Tencent’s servers, is widely practiced in China anyway. Taobao—think of it a bit like a Chinese eBay, but better—has thousands of vendors openly selling League of Legends boosting services.)