League of Legends Considers Hardware Level Bans For 'Soft Inting'

In a provocative tweet posted on July 8, 2024, League of Legends Game Director Pu Liu invited the public to share their views on a major change to League's punishment system.

Toxicity, poor sportsmanship, and intentional feeding have plagued League of Legends and other MOBAs since their inception. Now, Riot Games is better positioned than ever to police its massive player base. With the introduction of the Vanguard anti-cheat system earlier this year, Riot can now tie players not just to particular accounts but to their PC hardware. This means Riot Games could ban a player from the game regardless of which account they try to log in with. Of course, even this level of ban could be circumvented by purchasing a new computer or swapping out enough components to throw off Vanguard's machine ID system.

The official tweet reads:

"League will be looking into increased detection of and punishment for soft inting, which is a large problem in the game. Now that we have machine ID info with Vanguard, how quickly should we transition punishment from account level to hardware level? Immediately or some lenience?"

Perhaps the most startling admission in this post is Riot's confidence in their ability to detect 'soft inting' accurately. Soft inting refers to players who have given up attempting to win but are not deliberately dying. This can include strategies like avoiding team fights or farming the jungle or side lanes while the team needs assistance. The post also implies that Riot has already decided to transition to hardware bans for soft inting; they are only seeking player feedback on how quickly to implement this change.

If Riot succeeds with this policy change, we can expect to see stricter anti-cheat software in all major competitive online games.