On May 30th, 2024, Riot Games released an announcement detailing new and upcoming changes to how the studio would be dealing with community and player behavior in tactical shooter VALORANT (2020). This announcement is preceded by streamer Taylor Morgan’s viral X post where she clips a video of someone making sexual threats towards her.
The post garnered over 40 million views and 91k likes. Half a month later, Riot Games announced new measures to combat toxicity and harassment in voice chat.
“Muting is a tool for people who choose to use it, not something that is there to justify bad behaviors,”
VALORANT Studio Head Anna Donlon says in the video.
Along with the existing player support ticket system where players can submit issues on a case-to-case basis, VALORANT will be rolling out harsher penalties for severe behavior including hardware bans. Hardware bans target specific devices instead of things such as IP addresses. There has been constant discussion on the ethics of hardware bans, especially due to the fact that hardware bans require a certain amount of privacy to be given up in order for the service to be able to enact such bans.
Manual reviews are projected to have more support to fulfill these new policies. Additionally, Riot will be rolling out its voice evaluation system to “additional regions”. At the moment, the voice evaluation system is only available in North America for English. Riot also stated that they would do a “one-time review of the top suspected offenders from the previous act and issue penalties accordingly”.
Just like League of Legends, VALORANT will also roll out text filtering. When keywords are detected in a message, that specific message will be blocked and the player sending said message would be blocked from all communication for the rest of the match.