A new item that’s coming in League of Legends in Season 13, Heartsteel, is causing players to get banned on the PBE.
With a game like League of Legends, balance is incredibly difficult. The amount of moving parts with the massive roster of characters and wide variety of itemization choices means there are a lot of levers to adjust, and the slightest imbalance can break the game.
League of Legends players are excited to see what Season 13 holds in store. With several new items being added to the game, players are flocking to the PBE (Public Beta Environment) to try out new items.
Unfortunately, players who purchase or even interact with other players who bought the new item Heartsteel are getting flagged by Riot’s anti-cheat and getting permanently banned.
Heartsteel gets League of Legends players banned
A Reddit thread on the official PBE subreddit for LoL has revealed that several players testing the pre-season patch for Season 13 have been banned from the game for seemingly no reason.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
The thread for this post has other players who detailed their experience getting banned from the PBE, and have been trying to figure out what the correlation is between all of them getting banned.
However, once content creator Ross Boomsocks got banned on the PBE as well, several of the people who got permabanned have come together to find out what might be happening here. Through some investigation, the parties affected have deducted that Heartsteel is at the heart of the issue here.
Hello @RiotSupport me and everyone I played games with today on PBE got permabanned for seemingly no reason pls help.Affected accounts:ShopSaikoudotcomPositivePeteKreshlordPink DreamerWe all got banned for this reason dunno why pic.twitter.com/xnftkfChKJ
— RossBoomsocks (@RossBoomsocks) October 27, 2022
Players who got banned all either purchased the item themselves, or played with/against someone who also purchased the new item. It has yet to be confirmed by Riot whether or not this is the exact issue, but the correlation here is hard to ignore.
Ross went into further detail in a video he posted to his YouTube channel talking about his experience getting banned, as well as the experience of friends he was playing with getting banned for experimenting with the item.