League of Legends Season 12 brought several surprises — good or bad — to the community and one of them was the strategy of enchanters (and even other champions) on the Top Lane with the summoner spell Smite (Punishment in French). However, a Rioter in charge of sanctions and complaints recently banned a player for two weeks for using this strategy, claiming he was deliberately “trolling” his mates.
An abusive ban?
Our player — named “Yuumi Top OhTeeP” — currently boasts a 56% win rate and a Diamond Rank 1. He plays this enchanter/smite strategy a lot with champions such as Janna, Zilean, Karma, and even Yuumi. If the strategy was overpowered at the start of the season ( and probably had to make more than one rage) especially with Janna, Riot Games reacted and nerfed the Air Avatar in early February.
Everything was going normally for our player, until he found himself banned for 14 days for having used this strategy, accused of having deliberately “trolled” a game.
According to the head of Riot, “it was obvious” that the player was helping the enemy team. “You started from the top lane and stayed around Dragon just to avoid gaining XP and gold for the rest of the game”said the support.
However, this is precisely the objective of the strategy. For this to work, it is necessary to use champions that can perform well on low resources to guarantee meta advantages in the early game. Generally speaking, the team using this plan tends to get less gold, but it focuses on one or two champions who are able to complete their builds much faster than their opponents, creating a virtually win situation. guarantee. There is also a focus on helping the jungler gain more and more benefits.
The player disputed the sanction, saying the strategy was popular, and pointed out that the support should take a look at his history, as it proves he’s not one to troll: “It was just a bad game. We were all behind very quickly and a really tanky Sion just destroyed us. I tried to win, like every game. If you take a look at my opgg and look at my games with Maokai, you can see that I always farm few minions, even when I win, because I roam a lot.”
The ban was applied manually and has not yet been lifted. “Instead of correcting the strategy and having Rioters who know the current meta, they ban people for just using great tactics? Is that serious?”, underlined the player. Whether we like this way of playing or not, the ban here seems clearly abusive. In no case did the player troll, die in a loop under the turrets or intentionally feed.
Riot says stop to this strat
To note that Riot Games has clearly decided to put the brakes on this strategy with the latest patch, 12.4. The farming penalty for gold-generating items during the first 5 minutes of the game has been increased. Objective and gold bonuses have also been revised.. Enemy gold advance is now significantly less likely to lead to objective bounties activating if there are two or more gold-generating support items on your team, and bonuses in gold (also known as minion bounties) are now calculated based on the number of gold-generating support items on each team, instead of assuming each team has one gold-generating support item.
Our player’s misadventure happened before patch 12.4, before the deployment of said changes on the live servers.