The League of Legends community has taken an outlaw approach to Riot Games asking how it should punish soft-inters, responding with every wild answer under the sun including “street executions,” “guillotine,” and “firing squad.”
Pu Liu, League‘s game director, recently declared soft-inting is a punishable offense, with the development team now looking into increasing detection and punishment. After asking the community how severely soft-inters should be punished, hordes of League players responded satirically—and villainously.
Player responses included everything from bringing back tribunals to being immediately sent to jail or publicly executed on the gallows. A few more moderate punishment suggestions from League fans included kernel-level IP tracking to ban multiple smurf accounts, immediate bans for repeat offenders, or a three-strike policy, where at three strikes the offending player is banned from playing League for the rest of the year.
Although the responses vary greatly, most players agreed harsh, swift, and, in some cases, archaic punishments are the best ways to resolve the soft-inting problem.
The problem, though, is that soft-inting is fairly hard to define. What if someone is simply having a bad game—should they be immediately punished? There’s a lot of room for error with what Riot really means by soft-inting.
Rioter HuntedFork has attempted to allay concerns by clarifying what Riot means, such as following a jungler and taking their camps or selling items to buy six Tears. The dev also mentioned wasting summoner spells, which sparked new player fears considering some simply “fat finger” these abilities and accidentally waste them.
Riot doesn’t plan on taking action against those kinds of acts or if your teammate is just playing a poor game. But soft-inting is such a gray area that there may not be a 100 percent perfect way of detecting actual soft-inters or creating an accurate punishment system. While there’s no perfect answer or a way to detect soft-inting, hopefully, whatever changes Riot is cooking up will make ranked a little more bearable.
