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Newly Discovered Poppy Exploit Leads To Yet Another Banwave

Being a nearly 10-year-old game, League of Legends is no stranger to exploits, hacks, and a myriad of other ways that players have found to gain an unfair advantage over their enemies or simply ruin the game at hand.

 

And after fixing the famous Ornn exploit that resulted in a massive ban wave on the Chinese servers and disabling Kayn just a few weeks back, Riot's found their hands full with yet another exploit.

 

This time around, the cause of the ban-hammer coming down on unsuspecting exploit-abusers was Poppy, the Keeper of the Hammer.

 

What Was The Exploit In Question?

While most exploits in League of Legends required some finesse and luck to pull off correctly, this time, things were actually incredibly linear.

 

All you needed to do to replicate the game-breaking bug was select Poppy and take Hexflash with you going into a game.

 

Once you were loaded into a match, there were two more steps to follow:

1.    Use the normal Flash summoner spell as the spawn-gates come down.

2.    Use Hexflash while still being located in your team's fountain.

 

That's it! Simple, huh?

 

Performing this particular sequence of actions gave players the ability to extend the range of their Q, Hammer Shock to be global. This meant they could hit any player on the map, anywhere, at any point in time. They could also farm all of the jungle camps and kill off entire minion waves, all without ever setting foot out of their team's fountain.

 

As a consequence, most enemy players would just give up and go AFK, frustrated by the fact that they were getting killed by Poppy time and time again the moment they spawned back into the game.

 

And when you consider the fact that this bug resulted in some Poppy players racking up over 600 kills per match, it's easy to see just how devastating this exploit really was.

 

So The Abusers All Got Banned, Right?

The people that were having the time of their life dunking on enemy teams left and right from the comfort of their own base, securing more and more ELO with each effortless win, eventually, all had their fun cut short thanks to Riot disabling the Hexflash rune altogether.

 

But, they weren't the ones to face the wrong end of the ban hammer!

 

Surprisingly, Riot also decided to ban a whole horde of people for intentionally feeding out of sheer frustration when faced with the exploit in their own games. And while some people can walk away from the whole situation and shake off the 14-day default ban - for others, it was the last strike and resulted in a permanent ban on their accounts.

 

As such, the community is still up in arms over the fact that players abusing the exploit effectively got nothing more than a gentle "no, don't do that" while many of the victims had to take an involuntary leave from the game, and in some cases a permanent one.

 

Closing Thoughts

Throughout the years, when the League of Legends development team fixes one exploit, another one is sure to pop up rather quickly.

 

And while the Ornn exploit that saw over 3,000 Chinese players lose their accounts earlier in the year will definitely go down in history - the recently uncovered Poppy exploit might just be able to top that.

 

To stop the rampant abuse, the developers have temporarily disabled the Hexflash rune with an emergency hotfix on its way already. However, of course, for the many people that lost rankings thanks to carpet-bomber Poppy in their game, the fix is already far too late.

 

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