Pu Liu, game director of League of Legends, confirmed that Riot not only has the ability to enhance detection of soft-ingesting, but is also looking into ways to punish violators.

Soft-ingesting is apparently a "big problem in games," Liu tweeted as part of his announcement. The term covers players who do not intentionally lose games but do not contribute to winning. Instead of interacting with other players in team games and objectives, they tend to farm the side lanes and generally lose focus. Players engage in this behavior for a variety of reasons. They may be angry with someone on the team and want to stop that person from winning, or they may give up too soon and not be motivated to work hard for the rest of the match.

It can be difficult to tell the difference between a player with soft intings and one who is simply bad at the game, but the higher you go in Eros, the more obvious it becomes. This is why it used to be difficult for Riot's security software, Vanguard, to distinguish between real players and soft integrators and ban the accounts of soft integrators. However, this appears to be about to change.

"Now that we have machine ID information at Vanguard, how quickly should we move punishment from the account level to the hardware level? Liu says.

It sounds like a lord choosing for his subjects the punishment a criminal should receive, but most of the replies to this tweet are actually quite charitable, considering how frustrated the community is with soft-ing.

"I think there is a potential problem with separating soft inking from people who are genuinely bad at the game," one player replied.

"Maybe more data (e.g., how new the player is) could be taken into account before punishment.

Taking into account the newness of the player would eliminate all players who do not yet have a full grasp of the ins and outs of the league. Over the past decade, I have witnessed one of my friends work endlessly to master the league (or any game, really). And I would wager fairly confidently that Vanguard is confusing his very genuine attempts to win games with soft inking.

Vanguard is known to be quite brutal when it comes to sniffing out cheats. In fact, when it was first introduced, there was some controversy about it constantly running in the background and trying to detect vulnerable software. However, after the league's rollout earlier this year, Riot confirmed that "there have been no instances of Vanguard bricking anyone's hardware. Even though some players had problems with their PCs crashing or getting stuck in reboot loops.