Boosting

Boosting is a gaming tactic where players deliberately manipulate gameplay to inflate their stats, rankings, or in-game achievements. The gaming community generally considers it cheating because it undermines fair competition, distorts leaderboards, and diminishes legitimate accomplishments. To combat boosting, developers often impose penalties such as temporary or permanent bans, stat resets, or matchmaking restrictions.

Initially, boosting involved players intentionally dying or feeding kills to each other in competitive games like Call of Duty (COD) to improve their kill/death ratios (KDR). Over time, the term has evolved to refer to a higher-skilled player playing on someone else's account in multiplayer games to raise rank or unlock rewards. Players may coordinate with friends or use alternate accounts (smurfs) to exploit these systems, bypassing the intended challenges of the game and giving themselves an unfair edge.