League of Legends game director Pu Liu has confirmed that not only does Riot have the capabilities to increase detection of soft inting, but it’s also looking at ways to punish transgressors.
Soft inting is apparently “a large problem in the game,” Liu tweets as part of his announcement. This term covers players who don’t lose games on purpose but don’t contribute to a win. Instead of interacting with other players in a team fight or the objective, they tend to farm sidelanes and just generally switch off focus. Players can do this for various reasons. It may be that someone on their team made them angry, so they want to stop them from winning, or they just give up too quickly and can’t be bothered to try for the rest of the match.
It can be hard to distinguish between players who are soft inting and those who are just not very good at the game, but the higher up the elos you climb, the more obvious it can become. This is why it was previously hard to ban accounts for soft inting as Riot’s security software Vanguard couldn’t distinguish between genuine players and soft inters. However, it looks like this is about to change.
“Now that we have machine ID info with Vanguard, how quickly should we transition punishment from account level to hardware level?” Liu says. “Immediately or some lenience?”
Despite sounding like a lord asking his subjects to choose what punishment a criminal should be sentenced to, most of the replies to this tweet are actually quite merciful, considering how frustrating the community finds soft inting.
“I see potential problems with a separation between soft inting and someone genuinely having a bad game,” one player replies. “Leniency would make more sense at first, maybe the system could take in more data (how new the player is, for instance) into account before punishment.”
Taking into account how new a player is would weed out all of the players who are yet to fully grasp League’s ins and outs, but I know from firsthand experience that this isn’t a foolproof idea. Over the last ten years, I have witnessed one of my friends endlessly trying to master League (or any game, really), but for some unknown reason, he just can’t seem to get to grips with it. And I would place a pretty confident bet at Vanguard confusing his very genuine attempts to win a match as soft inting.
Vanguard is known to be pretty brutal when it comes to sniffing out cheats. In fact, when it was first introduced, there was some controversy about how it would constantly run in the background, trying to detect software with vulnerabilities. But following its League rollout earlier this year, Riot confirmed that there’s not been “any instance of Vanguard bricking anyone’s hardware,” despite some players having issues with their PC crashing or getting stuck in reboot loops.