NRG Esports’ Moon on elo boosting in the LCS

Sadly, elo boosting will always be tied to League of Legends, but are there top professionals who are still risking their careers to do it?

During a recent stream session on Twitch, NRG Esports’ Galen “Moon” Holgate talked to his chat about elo boosting in the North America League of Legends Championship Series (NA LCS). “I really can’t say, but you guys would be so surprised on how many people boost. It’s actually kind of disgusting. There’s so many boosters. If I told you guys who boosts, that are like in the scene, you guys would be like: ‘what the f**k.’ It’s actually depressing, because Riot doesn’t do anything about it,” said Moon.

Moon kept saying how common it is in the challenger scene and said, “Probably 50 percent of challenger players that aren’t on a team are boosters.”

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Someone on his stream asked him if he boosts, and Moon regretfully said no: “No, I wouldn’t boost. But it’s depressing because it’s like, ‘why don’t I boost,’ you know? Why don’t I just boost and make an extra $5K a month?”

Moon talked about elo boosting for a few minutes on his stream, and he started to backtrack from his earlier statments towards the end. “Ok, there actually are not that many boosters in the LCS. There’s a few. There’s a lot in NA CS,” explained Moon.

So, which is it? He was first acting like an insane amount of LCS pros were boosting, but then he changed his stance to saying there aren’t many?

Apex Gaming’s support Alex “Xpecial” Chu gave his two cents on the topic in a Reddit post: “There isn’t a single player on any team that I have played with that partook in elo boosting. I don’t know if it’s as rampant as Moon is claiming for LCS players, but I highly doubt any of the top players are boosting,” said Xpecial. He later added, “I can only speak from experience and none of the teams in the upper half of LCS would condone elo boosting for sure. As for the teams that cycle in and out, I can’t be certain, especially with the TiP fiasco last year.”

Former Renegades support Maria “Remi” Creveling also commented on Reddit about the subject. “It used to be commonplace for most lower tier LCS teams to supplement income with boosting, I know that for sure, and a lot of CS players or former CS players, defintely. I don’t think LCS players nowadays boost though since Riot seems pretty on top of most LCS players,” Remi explained.

“The average salary of the five challenger series players was $79,100.”

The true facts about players on the LCS elo boosting will probably never be revealed, so everything discussed will always just be speculation. It’s easy to believe that many pros elo boosted before League became this gigantic industry, because they probably needed to do it to make a decent living. However, that isn’t the case in today’s world of professional League of Legends.

A few months ago, Ember – a challenger series team from NA – publicly released their player salaries, and they sure were high.  The average salary of the five challenger series players was $79,100. Again, this was the average salary of five challenger series players. Not LCS superstars – challenger series players. That is a huge sum of money, and no one in their right mind would rist that type of salary over a few more bucks, right?

Most of the organizations that have a team in the LCS treat their players very well, so there’s no reason for those players to boost. A lot of you are probably thinking about the Yu “XiaoWeiXiao” Xian incident from the past summer, but that seems like an anomaly more than anything.

It will be interesting to see if there’s any backlash from Moon’s comments.

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