Riot Games is gearing up for a massive League of Legends crackdown, with “soft-inting” now firmly in the developers’ sights. The team isn’t playing around either, with Vanguard-backed hardware bans very likely.

Game director Pu Liu has warned League players across all servers about “soft-inting” with a post on X (formerly Twitter) today, where the MOBA boss declared the season open for the toxic offensive, which Riot sees as one of the “biggest problems in the game” and is keen to stamp out entirely.

The crackdown is being fueled by League’s newly implemented Vanguard system, which is designed to automatically ping offenders. Using kernel-level software, the League development team will track down and flag the flagged players. Once these soft-inting players are identified, they will be banned – though how brutal any bans will be is likely to be up to the player base.

Liu posed the question to the fandom on July 9: Should players who soft-in receive an account-level suspension, or should the League team use its Vanguard ban system to hand out stricter, more permanent hardware-level bans?