Summary
Riot Gamesis rolling out a new punishment for abuse inValorant, hitting the worst offenders with hardware bans. Instead of simply banning the offending account, the player would be completely prevented from playing on their PC or console again, stopping them from simply making another profile.
This comes as part of a range of updates Riot is making to its moderation systems in Valorant, focussing on “stronger, faster” penalties for “severe behaviour”. Riot also defends players who have been the victim of abuse in Valorant, saying that the advice to mute toxic players is not good enough.
Riot Is Coming Down Hard On Abusive Valorant Players
As reported byWin.gg, this update comes to us courtesy of Valorant studio head, Anna Donlon.
“The responsibility of protecting our community of Valorant players is one I take very personally, and I can tell you that very often it can feel like we’ve, like I’ve, failed in that responsibility,” says Donlon.
“In almost all cases, someone gets hurt in the process of making these systems better,” she continues. “Too often it takes someone experiencing the worst behaviours - something egregious, something painful, something threatening - for us to better understand where the gaps in our systems and processes are.”
Donlon is likely referring to a recent viral clip fromTwitchstreamer Taylor Morgan, in which she was subjected to threats of sexual violence while playing Valorant.
“We have no room for these types of behaviour in our game or in our community,” Donlon says. “When you tell someone to ‘just mute comms’ to avoid harassment, you’re essentially putting the harassed person in a position to not communicate, to compromise how they want to play the game to accommodate you.
“If you need to make truly evil statements under the guise of regular s**t talk to enjoy gaming, then please play something else. We won’t miss you.
Riot says that its new measures will be rolled out in the next 30 days. This will strengthen existing policies, as well as roll out the hardware bans which make it much harder for repeat offenders to set up new accounts. Riot will also expand its voice chat moderation systems, hopefully making it harder for abuse as we saw in the clip above to go unnoticed.
