League players not convinced Riot can police “soft-inting”

A Riot Games dev has said hardware bans are in store for players who “soft int,” but players aren’t buying it.

Pu Liu, Game Director for League, announced on July 8 that Riot is looking to start rolling out punishment for soft inting with hardware bans, as the practice is “a large problem in the game.”

Soft inting is a League term for subtly losing the game for your team, without overtly throwing away the match by posting a bad scoreline or trolling. Hardware bans are one of the more extreme options for game developers as they suspend players’ devices on top of their game accounts.

League of Legends personalities like caster Barento ‘Raz’ Mohammed responded apprehensively to the announcement, telling Liu that Riot should be lenient rather than quickly handing out such harsh bans.

“I’m never a fan of hardware bans for something like this,” Raz said on social media.

On the other hand, players do not seem convinced that Riot would give out such a harsh punishment for something as subtle as soft inting, according to multiple threads and comments on the game’s Reddit forum.

Riot Games

“I simply don’t believe them,” one Reddit user said. “It’d be impossible to discern between bad play and soft int. I’d argue that it’s impossible to discern by definition. Otherwise, it’s just regular inting.”

Another user said they think a system designed to detect the practice would only be able to work at high ranks.

“People in like silver can just randomly make stupid plays without realizing it’s a mistake,” they said.

Another thread about the announcement explained how hard it would be to truly detect someone subtly throwing matches.

“You can’t dish out punishment for ‘inting’ because it’s subjective. Nunu running it down 20 times into the turret is easy detection. Amumu not smiting the baron three times in a row because someone took his raptor camp is not EVER going to be detectable,” one player said.

Others pointed toward League streamers as the first players to be subject to the soft inting detection process as they claimed some creators have been throwing games on Twitch for years.

Riot Games has yet to release more information about how it will detect the practice or how fast hardware bans will be implemented. The developer has taken a hard-line stance of policing negative behavior in its titles but has yet to reveal how it plans to detect or remedy these behaviors.