Valorant studio head tells toxic players to "play something else, we won't miss you"
"If you want to make evil statements under the guise of s**t talk, you aren't welcome here."
In a frank discussion about the "current state of player behaviour" in Valorant, Riot Games' head Anna Donlon has outlined upcoming changes designed "to make our community a better place".
Though Donlon acknowledges that the development team had no plans to "sanitise gaming" or suppress harmless banter, she said players should not be expected to "grow a thicker skin" when playing video games.
"There's no room in our community for the most egregious behaviours, and we're not going to compromise on that point," she said.
"Since launching [Valorant], especially with the addition of voice comms, we've known that fighting in-game harassment was going to be both something we needed to prioritise, and also would be one of the most challenging issues that we would face," Donlon said.
"We've been working on systems and technologies, and we actually have been making a lot of progress. But having large global player communities presents unique challenges – evolving challenges."
After explaining that she's spent the last few weeks reviewing player logs, looking at penalty escalation paths and discussing "player behaviour philosophies", Donlon says Riot "absolutely needs to do better", not least to better protect the people who play the game – something she thinks the studio has essentially "failed" at so far.
"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 added. "And that's exactly what we're experiencing and addressing right now."
In a follow-up post, Riot outlined five key actions it was taking to "improve the state of player behaviour", stressing that anyone wanting to make "evil statements under the guise of shit talk" are "not welcome here".
In the next 30 days, the team says it will finalise updates to existing policies to focus on stronger, faster penalties for "severe, harmful" player behaviour – including hardware bans – and increase support for the manual reviews to support these policies.
It also pledges to expand the rollout of Riot's voice evaluation systems to additional, if unspecified, regions later this year, and undertake a one-time review of the "top suspected offenders from the previous act and issue penalties accordingly".
When zero-tolerance text is detected, Riot says it will "stop that message from being posted" and mute the player for the rest of the match.
The changes also include a new "bystander feedback" feature which means if anyone in your Valorant match is "actioned on", you'll receive a notice about their outcome, even if you didn't report them yourself.
Any player who thinks they've been threatened or harassed in-game are invited to submit a ticket to riot.com/playersupport.
It's the latest in Riot's long-running effort to clamp down on toxicity and unacceptable behaviours in Valorant. In July 2022, Riot Games began collecting "in-game voice communications" in North America as part of its "larger effort to combat disruptive behaviour."
At launch, Valorant game director Joe Ziegler told Eurogamer Riot was "definitely trying to get ahead" of the sort of toxicity seen in League of Legends, explaining that the company was trying to centralise its efforts and "draw from that as we go". He did note, however, that Valorant presented a unique set of issues due to its gameplay, which would require "specific salves around certain features".