Toxicity and harassment are still too widespread in the Valorant community, according to the game’s developers who have announced new plans to tackle misconduct and bad behavior.
A blog post outlines how the game will better deter and respond to such behavior, while reaffirming Riot's commitment to creating a more inclusive environment.
“While we can never remove the bad conduct itself from individuals, we can work to deter behavior such as insults, threats, harassment, or offensive language through our game systems,” the blog reads. “There’s also room to encourage ‘pro-social’ behavior.”
The blog post outlines several steps Valorant’s dev team has been taken so far, including following up player reports of misconduct and implementing a muted words list that lets players manually filter out phrases they’d rather not see. But it also admits these efforts have had little tangible impact on players’ experience and more work needs to be done.
“When we surveyed players, we noticed that the frequency with which players encounter harassment in our game hasn’t meaningfully gone down,” the blog says.
“Long story short, we know that the work we’ve done up to now is, at best, foundational, and there’s a ton more to build on top of it in 2022 and beyond.”
The team is currently working on several additional features to crack down on abuse in-game. These include harsher punishments for those caught by existing systems, improved moderation of voice comms, and real-time moderation of the in-game chat, which should allow the game to automatically administer punishments during a match, rather than after it ends.
The blog post also mentions the Valorant team will begin testing ways of recording and evaluating voice comms after a misconduct report is submitted. This would provide clearer evidence to support claims of abuse.
“We’re trying different ways to engage with the player base in the coming year to better understand where we can improve, and we’ll be sure to be transparent about where we are in terms of the tech we are building and where our head’s at/heading so we can keep the feedback loop open with you all.”
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