Since the mid-season update arrived for Teamfight Tactics players worldwide, the “competitors” community has been quite enthusiastic about climbing the ranks due to the new Trait System, while also trying to rank up after the mid-season rank reset. However, not everyone climbs the ranks in a “healthy” manner; a small number of people still exploit buffing elo to reach extremely high ranks on the server. The peak is a player on the North American server who has climbed to top 14 Challenger solely by buffing elo:
Currently, this player’s account is sitting at top 14 Grandmaster (which will be Challenger as soon as Riot Games unlocks Challenger in a few days). Thanks to buffing elo, this account has a top 1 rate of 28.6% and a top 4 rate of 83.7% (the highest in the top 100 players on this server).
Just by looking at the match history, we can easily see two accounts used to buff elo are “yingyingmonster” and “wxhutsingtao”. After seeing this blatant buffing elo situation without any punishment, Riot Games has received countless “backlash” for not paying attention to the community’s reports about the elo buffing accounts.
Fortunately, according to Riot Mort’s sharing in a recent stream, in the ranked mode of Teamfight Tactics, accounts from Master and above can only play solo starting from patch 10.13. This change will somewhat reduce the extremely negative elo buffing rate currently at high ranks; for lower ranks, we can only hope for another solution.