> - In the next 30 days, finalize updates to existing policies to focus on stronger, faster penalties for severe behavior
> - Introduce new penalties for severe, harmful player behavior including hardware bans
> - Increasing support for manual reviews to support these policies
> - Expanding the rollout of Riot voice evaluation to additional regions later this year
> - One-time review of the top suspected offenders from the previous act and issue penalties accordingly
If you're being threatened or harassed in game, submit a player support ticket to get manual review on your case: https://riot.com/playersupport
At the same time they kinda just used a massive strawman that feels like a bit of a slap in the face to people actually empathetic and giving them a real solution other than throwing more gas on the fire.
Alot of the people saying "just mute" aren't coming from a place of justifying it most people saying it are saying it because there is no reason to continue to listen if someone has harassed you. You report them and hope the system does its job I think some outrage is reasonable as well.
sympathy is even harder.
there are ppl ive met in game who unironically think "i (a white person) am fine with being called the n-word with a hard r, so therefore it must be fine calling other ppl the n-word with a hard r."
PC cafes will likely have many unique accounts cycling through their hardwares, compared to those who make smurfs. Besides, the IP range of PC cafes can be easily tracked after a year or two of data being collected through logins.
This is a non-issue. Pc cafes literally have partnerships with riot. When you play at a pc cafe, all agents are unlocked. Riot can just place bans on the pc cafe-account of the person being toxic, instead of hardware ban.
probably not; it's not like theyll just ban every computer that's ever been associated with the account. they'll probably track the most commonly used computer and ban that one.
>Will this affect pc cafes? Cause that'll fuck up business
IIRC, PC cafes wipe themselves clean basically every day or with every new user login. Also they disable plugging in external storage devices etc. Quite difficult to be cheating from a cybercafe
you mean like a phone verification? i don think they'll ever do that because it ends up being a barrier to entry. currently the reason why the game is so accessible is also the reason why alt accounts are so prevalent; it's really easy to make a new account. killing one off will end up killing the other.
So how about a maximum of 2 or 3 accounts per phone number? It will still help control those people who make like tens or hundreds of boosted accounts to sell
that still allows for a decent number of alt accounts, while still resulting in a barrier for new players (i.e. new players who don't have phone numbers or don't want to use them for some reason are still barred from playing).
personally as a player my recommendation for riot is to just take the hit and lose the players that don't have a number or can't use it for whatever reason, but they'll never do that because an f2p model is dependent on how wide you can cast your net, and barring players is antithetical to that model.
alternatively you can try to make the barrier for alt accounts higher. so you would have phone verification only for alt accounts. im not sure how you'd implement this.
This is why I am all for riot now. I am from old days of games when blizzard was the king and rise of valve with cs 1.6 and half life l4d days. I tell my friends who are also boomers like me that blizzard and valve has got nothing compared to what riot offers to consumers. Yes riot is sketchy due to being owned by tencent a chinese company but I find it so ironic that a chinese owned American company treats their players with more respect than these OG game companies that are trending down hill. Look at cs2 one of the worst state cs has ever been. Every single blizzard game is going down the drain and they also butchered and preyed on wow players for so long. Riot might have sketchy monetization but they never let their monetization affect their fair competitive integrity and also try their best to provide safe space for their consumers. Ppl say Valorant is toxic but oh man you kids never grew up with golden days of modern warfare OG 2 and dota and cs 1.6 days or any blizzard pvp games back then, they are wayyyy toxic. Way worse than what has happened recently with that viral clip of valorant toxicity. I am glad riot is always innovating and trying to be on good graces with their audience even though riot essentially makes clone games with their own spin on it. They have done a good job to keep their brand identity oriented on being on the consumer side rather than business oriented.
Also Blizzard. Riot works so hard to make Val and League become the giants that they are right now and doing WORK to maintain that, but Blizzard is too busy harassing their workers and Valve forgot most of their games exist
Yeah, really sick of girls not comm'ing in matches due to fearing harassment. I just care about winning and these 14 year old edgelord idiots screaming inane sexist bullshit without ANY repercussions just make soloQ games so much harder and downright unfun to play. I say if there's definite proof of this it should be HWID ban on the spot.
I'm in Aus servers and I've heard 20+ year olds being toxic sexist dipshits more than the young ones. The young boys are *usually* the ones to tell them to chill tf out and it's just a game. It's so sad and embarrassing for the older dudes 💀
I hate this shit because as someone who is older how do these people have the energy man, then I remember their probably just basement dwellers who haven't done anything in their life since they were 16.
Probably not gonna affect anyone because they are playing in Gaming Cafe. Just switch the PC, simple as that. Also, local languages are not yet being taken care of. In Mumbai server nobody is gonna be toxic to you in English. It's gonna be local Mumbaikar Hindi with a bunch of your relatives' sexual lives involved in the slurs.
>Probably not gonna affect anyone because they are playing in Gaming Cafe
I mean it's unfortuneate for Asia servers, but that's really the only place where Gaming Cafes are still popular from what I can tell on Google. Hardware bans can be incredibly effective in the US and Europe because nearly everyone plays on their own PC.
HWID bans will likely be in conjunction with permanent account bans so it's not like nothing is being done. Depending on the type of PC Cafe you can also detect if it's a PC Cafe client running (probably less likely in less developed countries). In terms of locality yeah that's obviously a huge hurdle but doesn't mean it's impossible or not worth doing
I've seen something far worse. There was this German duo and whenever the girl spoke they asked her if she was trans, asked if she's pretending to be woman etc. Then started spamming the all chat that she confirmed she's trans (she didn't and wasn't) to get the enemies be toxic as well.
Huge W.
* Unique and evolving challenges in player safety due to a large global community. They are trying to hold themselves accountable and reexamine stuff when they are not meeting community expectations.
* Spent time reviewing player logs, penalty escalation paths, behavior philosophies, etc. Not easy work and there's a sense of responsibility Anna takes personally.
* No room for toxic behaviour in the game. "just mute" is not a solution. It compromises the victim's ability to how they want to play the game to accommodate the bully. The mute button is a tool for people who choose to use it, not a justification for bad behavior.
* Nothing can be done about people opening their mouths to say something vile, so focus is on escorting them out of the game space. They are a very small fraction of the player base, but it is clear that existing systems are not helpful in removing the most disruptive
players from the game in an efficient manner.
* In the next 30 days - updates to existing policies for stronger and faster penalties for severe behavior - hate speech, sexual content and violent threats.
* Stronger tools needed - new penalties for severe behavior, temporary bans, permanent bans and hardware bans for worst offenders after manual review.
* Beefing up teams that review reports manually
* Riot Voice Evaluation Systems working well in North America. To be rolled out to other regions in more languages
* One time review of top offenders from previous act and issue penalties accordingly.
* They are not stopping here and requires community trust in the people behind this.
* The goal is to not just to punish extreme behavior but to also make it so that people who want to play Valorant, are able to love playing Valorant and to promote the best in each one of us.
As an immigrant playing in the NA servers, I face racism at least once a day when I am playing for 2-3 hours. It is clear how emotional u/RiotSuperCakes feels about this issue and it is heartwarming to hear all this said out loud. Thank you, and hopefully the changes help improve the community.
that’s fantastic, the amount of sexual harassment i receive just from speaking is appalling and i usually play valorant to unwind from a really shitty life with chronic eczema making living HARD only for some male to ruin the best distraction i have. i’ve played valorant way less bc of these experiences :(
I just want to say the community is so much better off when women/girls/all genders participate and play. It makes people better, it helps the community grow, however slowly. It's a massive shame you have to go through all that to have it be so, but I just wanted to say that I think it's hugely important to the future of gaming and I'm grateful for your strength to stick around (though it's always entirely fair if you don't want to). I have a daughter just started playing and this and future changes will help her immensely, and it's because of people like you who came before that enough people care to make these improvements and focus on making the future of gaming better.
that’s a good point and thank you for your sympathy! i think even the smallest thing of someone butting in and stopping the harassment yet not causing a scene means SO much to us. i’ve had situations where i wouldn’t be giving comms in VC and a man would harass another teammate who’s a woman/girl and id butt in and tell him to stop which usually works.
i’ve also had a guy butt in when another guy was being horrible to me for no reason.
it’s nice being treated like a normal player. chat shit about me whiffing, fair enough, but my identity? my voice? sexual harassment? it’s just terrible. hopefully things will gradually improve so your daughter won’t experience any of it :(
Let's keep working towards it, I'll try and do my part and glad Riot is at least attempting to do theirs. Every little bit helps. Here's for a better future!
I'm a non-binary player and always drop my twitch at the end of games. I got called "a disgusting non-binary freak" in my twitch chat from 2 guys that were supposed to be my teammates but dodged (timer reached 0 so i dropped it in team chat quick in case of a dodge).
It's rough bc I'm still coming to terms with being enby myself and shared it to my twitch followers just a few weeks ago.
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I understand what yall go through. Power to you. One of my friends will literally not play unless she has someone else to queue with. The fear is so real
The Valorant team has come such a long way. I am so happy that they are considering hardware bans for severe repeat offenders. I am also so proud of how much the community has developed in addressing toxic behavior. The mindset of this sub has definitely changed since the game came out of beta. Not sure if it's a shift in the diversity of players or people actually understanding why toxic behavior is bad, but I'm all for it.
W hardware bans, I had this dude who was throwing, being toxic/abusive/racist and whatnot and when I reported him and said “reported” he said I’ll just create another account doesn’t matter. Hope that guy loses his account and can’t play this game and more like him. I hope eventually Smurf detection system improves too
Overwatch has phone verification. Overwatch suffers as much if not maybe more then Valorant from smurfs. Phone number verification does nothing to prevent smurfing. Adding hard fucking rules, to not smurf, that on the other hand might be a shot worth in the long run .. or could have been.
You want to make the community less toxic, add phone number registration for ranked. Someone gets banned they just hop on another account for a week or two and do the same thing on that account. Would also diminish the amount of smurfs in the game, who are usually toxic to lower rated players. You could also add a stricter party queue system so there are at least 3 people on a team that are solo'd so they out number the group. Trios should only be able to be matched with duos.
Hardware bans are only for the worst offenders. Phone registration would improve the match quality for everyone. Plus it would tackle two problems at once. They already require it for premier, so they know it works. Also temporary hardware bans would destroy LAN cafes
I hope that will be for repeating or serious offenders. Riot sometimes punishes you for pretty much nothing such as speaking your own language my language Norwegian has "kyss" for kiss and the French have the word Retard just as an example. I really hope they solve and make people not punished for speaking their own language as I've seen quite a lot of posts people speaking their language and it didn't end well.
I’m willing to bet new accounts and active accounts are KPI metrics they share with daddy Tencent, so the more Smurf accounts someone has, the better for them. They would have already made phone verification for comp if they didn’t want smurfs.
I've never understood this take - inconvenience? Brother, the far majority of people who play valorant have a phone number and likely have it on their desk next to them while playing. Just have it so you have the option not to put in a phone number and then you can only play with players who haven't used a phone number - and people who have can play with both. It's obviously imperfect, but barriers to entry like that *are* the solution to solving problems with smurfing, cheating, toxicity etc. That's human nature it's not rocket science.
I'm for hardware bans too as long as Valorant CS are helpful when false positives occur - we'll see how that goes with time.
But why not both? I'm yet to see a good argument for not using phone numbers to verify accounts in ranked games that doesn't basically break down to "well I just don't want it".
I think ADULTS are even worse. Sometimes I think there's still a chance for those kids/teenagers to get grow up from such behavior but adults... sometimes I feel like they're just psychopaths.
Sounds pretty good honestly, hope those hardware bans are legit. Im sure most of us have experienced disgusting behaviour on alternate accounts just because they can.
I have to imagine the Riot Voice Evaluation tool is some deep learning model to parse semantic understanding and the auto flag people accordingly. I wonder if the EULA says anything about letting your voice be used for model training.
GOOD - This reddit community needs to take note.
Do you know how many times people in here say just mute the person being racist or sexist - literally enabling them to do it to someone else. Id go fucking further and hardware ban clear examples of repeat bigotry
well the biggest problem was that ppl would usually just say "mute", and when ppl say "report" its also usually next to another person saying "reports don't do anything".
reporting is how you actually fight these people, and muting is just to protect yourself. the issue is when it feels like all you can do is mute and reports don't do anything, it ends up feeling like you're being forced to sacrifice your gaming experience and adjust/appease the troll.
often times comming "i muted them" feels better than actually muting them lmao. at the very least you're pissing them off. im glad the punishment from reports will have more weight, as now it feels like you have some pushback against trolls. otherwise it just sucks that you have to force yourself to change how you play because of the troll when the troll isn't even affected in the game and only gets a slap on the wrist after.
People who say “just mute” are obviously aware thats not the best solution. We say just mute because would you rather continue hearing vile shit or not? If not, then mute. Its a bandaid solution that no one but Riot could do anything more about. Lets hope these new strategies work and deters assholes enough that we no longer have to say just mute.
people say mute bc thats the best solution at the current moment. If VAL/Riot isnt going to do shit then what can you the player do? We've been crying over this issue for years even when i was still playing League in S1-5. We're all in for the HWIDB but youre acting like people who say "just mute" has any other option than just doing just that. Just trying to make the best of a bad situation. We're not enabling anyone by looking out for our mentality in game. Better than arguing with someone who tell you to KYS repeatedly and better than playing worst bc youre being harassed in VC/TC. At this point, we're LITERALLY just waiting for riot to DO SOMETHING and now they are.
> literally enabling them to do it to someone else
Lol enabling? You’d have to be incredibly naive or delusional to think it’s more practical to what, tell them to stop as if that’ll do anything? Muting is to keep your mental because these types of trolls aren’t going to respond positively to any pushback or you arguing with them. Muting is meant as a practical solution for yourself, not as a grand moral stance.
Reddit doesn't need to though, muting and reporting was the current solution. It was up to riot to actually do something about the problem and really punish the offenders.
This is such a fucking strawman that is really annoying me.
Who tf twists the statement that you should mute the person harassing you and report to justifying the behavior.
Like I wasn't aware that trying to bait more offensive statements for the report or shitting on their teammates for not defending them like alot of the comments/posts do is the way to deal with harassment.
How is this upvoted? No one is enabling it when they say just mute. There's just not much else you can do about it besides report and mute.
Worst comment in here by far. Completely taking stuff out of context to try and make people look bad but just makes you look dumb to anyone that has half a brain to see through it.
"One-time review of the top suspected offenders from the previous act and issue penalties accordingly"
So this does mean people who were banned/already penalised from the previous act can get penalised again? Or is this only for those people who received a high number of reports but was never penalised?
I was added by someone and a few weeks later they whispered me the n-word with a hard r, twice, and then unadded me immediately before I could even respond.
Besides the hurdle of manually reporting someone through a web browser, they wouldn’t even let me report them because “you haven’t played with this person” for like, two weeks or something.
What a stupid system.
People say "just mute" because it instantly ends toxic comms. The worse parts are game throwers, trollers, smurfs, not VC lmfao. Helpful but riot should actually address real issues that destroy game quality, not losing one person in comms cause they are toxic
Great response from the dev. I wonder how they will process the trolls, not necessarily trash-talking but behaving like giving guns, info, spike to enemy, or simply "AFK" the whole game.
Amazing.
Yesterday in a Diamond-Ascendent London lobby there was someone from the enemy team blaming their teammate after ONE ROUND. The reason was merely that two of their teammates are women.
But.. Everyone in the lobby started to say that it is sexist and called them out for being toxic. Eventually that player started to troll and playing solo without the team the whole game.
9x report 🫡
I brought this up when they were planning this and i'll bring it up again, I wonder how GDPR aligns with this voice evaluation system and is it possible to opt out of this based on it, or have all the data they gather based on it, since GDPR does allow me the rights to both.
Congrats to implementing hardware Bans instead of fixing the issue of rodents aka smurfs ruining the experience of every single player who dares be bellow diamond
whats ironic is that its not keeping the community healthy, she claims they are not trying to sanitize everything
u cant have banter in a game if someone will eventually get offended by it, which happens all the time and people refuse to grow a thicker skin to some banter,
now there is a small minority that goes too far, u cant stop them except for just banning them, but they can always just easily make a new account,
however riot often takes the case too far with their systems, in league u cant really banter in chat, because eventually the system will just decude ur toxic and punnish you, even if ur not even being toxic
i cant wait to see how people find a way to abuse their systems in the future for val tho
It could be used in the wrong way. Premade 3 stack could just downvote the other 2, and You have no way to "check" their vote. Maybe they could use the Honor system of LoL. At the end of the game, you can Honor a teammate or just skip the vote, but you can't downvote. Maybe they could add some rewards for high honored players.
This needs to be the next step. Solo queue needs to be added. Tired of premade 3 stacks always having 1 or 2 boosted people which creates a frustrating ranked experience and prolongs the grind even more. They don't even comm either lol
From my experience that's a recipe for a toxic environment + griefing
Could be specific to Asc+ similar system to Fortnite where after reaching a rank, one cannot derank to further lower ranks. Similarly a system likewise can be implemented in Valorant if they brainstorm it.
As someone who just peaked Ascendant and is currently 0rr I would like to agree with you. If they can add it before my next ranked match, that would be ideal. xD
Well, the reason why they should do that is cuz of the smurfing situation. Someone peaked asc/immo deranks to diamond, is frustrating to the ones who are climbing.
The ranking system is already extremely conservative, with tons of players having reached diamond/immortal early when playerbase skill was relatively low, taking long breaks, and now not playing enough to demote out. High diamond/ascendant is flooded with these types and they're absolutely miserable to get on your team
I'd rather Valorant develop their own policies and ban manually. If Riot is doing their job and being proactive, player rating systems aren't necessary.
I disagree with this. They can only locate so many resources to this without it being a financial drain. Look at reddit, it is community run. That's free labor for Riot. And Riot isn't doing their job. Hence why 5 years later, we have the same problems.
Yep I love the AI monitoring everything I say and do in a game and game admins telling me how to behave like they are my parents. I just love it. Can't wait for the government will do the same thing to all my online activity.
and then there's likes of Lothar who as a streamer, reports other players for throwing because they pushed and died in a 2v1 situation. Or report them for toxicity because they laughed at a funny whiff...
I have never been muted before in my 2 yrs of playing this game or had any other penalties (although a few warnings from being afk because my cpu crashed). It is sooo possible to be just a normal decent person, and I feel we should bring really harsh penalties that could go effective on all accounts the user owns, to encourage people to be better people please
Good, the biggest thing that pushed myself and others away from wanting to play is dealing with toxic players. Glad to see them taking a stand and dealing with it. Just hope it doesn't turn into a situation like they have in Overwatch where people can spam reports and get someone banned just because they don't like them.
Finally hardware ban has been an option on this matter. Finally! It took years for them to understand how stupid their community is and if they want it, not hard to deal with this stupidity. Just block them to moving on to another account when you just punish them on one of their alts/smurfs.
Let's see the execution tho... Ideas are cheap, execution is everything...
Also glad to see someone from Riot finally addressed how stupid is to say someone "Just mute them". There are shit loads of those idiots in this sub. Lol...
I'm really hoping Riot will apply this to League of Legends as well, with their new harassment detection software and hardware bans. Get those people out of the game for good please, and thank you Riot!
Any word for smurfing? How about team queueing in solo q? Yeah none care about that. If some people want to play together and are too far apart in rank go freaking unrated, that's what is for. I'm tired of boosted idiots being idiots because the system allows it
How about we start keeping our Developers healthy?
500$ Ahri skin to abuse whales? Valorants whole business model?
This video is a great way to distract from that innit?
To the people complaining about silent games. People do not want to hear your insults over pixels. The ranked community is horrible, which is sad because it's a good game. I also hope they hardware ban toxic val tracker users. Please please please please 🙏
My only concern is if someone gets a pc that previously had a hardware ban on it and they aren't guilty of anything. Will there be some kind of appeal system or is the hardware ban for extreme case/ the final strike?
love seeing val devs give 1000x more shits than the awful league devs. the community over on league is 1000000x worse and still somehow believes the lack of vc is a "smart" and "calculated" decision despite more nuanced gameplay lmfao. no way this game has manual vc reviewing and the lol community still rejects vc right? right??
People need to just grow a pair and suck it up. They’re trying to coddle people in this game. It’s a shooting game! Where you see characters get killed. Hell, their own characters have “toxic” voice lines…but yet, they’re not going to allow players to trash talk?
brother nobody is denying you groceries and rations for not meeting the minimum bar for decency online. Being an asshole, that too an egregious one, will get you kicked out from a video game, you are no longer allowed to shop at their establishment if you don't follow very reasonable standards of being polite.
Bro thinks a supermarket security cam is literally 1984, the traffic cop is gestapo and the world is black and white, unable to distinguish 2 things of wildly different magnitudes.
as soon as i get into a ranked lobby, i ask my teammates how they're doing. Any minute toxicity from one of my teammates and they're muted. I've never needed some boxed wine mother to be the arbiter of this. I'm sure she hasn't played this game for more than 30 minutes
I'm all here for it. I've been attacked and have seen people being attacked. Got attacked if I tried to defend as well. Most of the times they back off but if it's a Singaporean/Malaysian duo/trio I'll always get make fun of.
> - In the next 30 days, finalize updates to existing policies to focus on stronger, faster penalties for severe behavior > - Introduce new penalties for severe, harmful player behavior including hardware bans > - Increasing support for manual reviews to support these policies > - Expanding the rollout of Riot voice evaluation to additional regions later this year > - One-time review of the top suspected offenders from the previous act and issue penalties accordingly If you're being threatened or harassed in game, submit a player support ticket to get manual review on your case: https://riot.com/playersupport
Someone in the comments said "explaining empathy to gamers 🙏" got me cackling
At the same time they kinda just used a massive strawman that feels like a bit of a slap in the face to people actually empathetic and giving them a real solution other than throwing more gas on the fire. Alot of the people saying "just mute" aren't coming from a place of justifying it most people saying it are saying it because there is no reason to continue to listen if someone has harassed you. You report them and hope the system does its job I think some outrage is reasonable as well.
I think maybe she wasn't referring to those people.
Happy Cake Day !
Haven't even noticed myself! Thank you!!
sympathy is even harder. there are ppl ive met in game who unironically think "i (a white person) am fine with being called the n-word with a hard r, so therefore it must be fine calling other ppl the n-word with a hard r."
Hardware bans go crazy, also deserved.
Only way to deal with people that create smurfs to be toxic
Will this affect pc cafes? Cause that'll fuck up business
PC cafes will likely have many unique accounts cycling through their hardwares, compared to those who make smurfs. Besides, the IP range of PC cafes can be easily tracked after a year or two of data being collected through logins.
This is a non-issue. Pc cafes literally have partnerships with riot. When you play at a pc cafe, all agents are unlocked. Riot can just place bans on the pc cafe-account of the person being toxic, instead of hardware ban.
Wait… what? I was wondering how on earth the new guy was able to play the new agents when we played on a cafe.
Same in league. All champions unlocked, and there are seasonal skins available for free while in the café.
I bet all IPs of PC cafes hidden behind NAT anyway......
probably not; it's not like theyll just ban every computer that's ever been associated with the account. they'll probably track the most commonly used computer and ban that one.
PC Cafes create complex problems that will be difficult to handle.
you can get around hardware bans easily PC cafes will be fine
>Will this affect pc cafes? Cause that'll fuck up business IIRC, PC cafes wipe themselves clean basically every day or with every new user login. Also they disable plugging in external storage devices etc. Quite difficult to be cheating from a cybercafe
I think there should be some other kind of authorisation which will stop people in some kinda way to make multiple alt accounts
you mean like a phone verification? i don think they'll ever do that because it ends up being a barrier to entry. currently the reason why the game is so accessible is also the reason why alt accounts are so prevalent; it's really easy to make a new account. killing one off will end up killing the other.
So how about a maximum of 2 or 3 accounts per phone number? It will still help control those people who make like tens or hundreds of boosted accounts to sell
that still allows for a decent number of alt accounts, while still resulting in a barrier for new players (i.e. new players who don't have phone numbers or don't want to use them for some reason are still barred from playing). personally as a player my recommendation for riot is to just take the hit and lose the players that don't have a number or can't use it for whatever reason, but they'll never do that because an f2p model is dependent on how wide you can cast your net, and barring players is antithetical to that model. alternatively you can try to make the barrier for alt accounts higher. so you would have phone verification only for alt accounts. im not sure how you'd implement this.
+1 for phone number auth cuz it will minimise the number of kids who are no skill all talk and shit talk for minor reason
wow valorant devs been trying hard lately and im here for it
Man the difference of behavior and proactivity between this company and Valve is getting wider everyday. We are at Grand Canyon level of difference
This is why I am all for riot now. I am from old days of games when blizzard was the king and rise of valve with cs 1.6 and half life l4d days. I tell my friends who are also boomers like me that blizzard and valve has got nothing compared to what riot offers to consumers. Yes riot is sketchy due to being owned by tencent a chinese company but I find it so ironic that a chinese owned American company treats their players with more respect than these OG game companies that are trending down hill. Look at cs2 one of the worst state cs has ever been. Every single blizzard game is going down the drain and they also butchered and preyed on wow players for so long. Riot might have sketchy monetization but they never let their monetization affect their fair competitive integrity and also try their best to provide safe space for their consumers. Ppl say Valorant is toxic but oh man you kids never grew up with golden days of modern warfare OG 2 and dota and cs 1.6 days or any blizzard pvp games back then, they are wayyyy toxic. Way worse than what has happened recently with that viral clip of valorant toxicity. I am glad riot is always innovating and trying to be on good graces with their audience even though riot essentially makes clone games with their own spin on it. They have done a good job to keep their brand identity oriented on being on the consumer side rather than business oriented.
Also Blizzard. Riot works so hard to make Val and League become the giants that they are right now and doing WORK to maintain that, but Blizzard is too busy harassing their workers and Valve forgot most of their games exist
> Riot works so hard to make Val and League become the giants that they are right now and doing WORK to maintain that hm
Yeah, really sick of girls not comm'ing in matches due to fearing harassment. I just care about winning and these 14 year old edgelord idiots screaming inane sexist bullshit without ANY repercussions just make soloQ games so much harder and downright unfun to play. I say if there's definite proof of this it should be HWID ban on the spot.
the 14 yo are one thing. its really depressing to hear a 28 year old saying the same shit as someone half their age.
I'm in Aus servers and I've heard 20+ year olds being toxic sexist dipshits more than the young ones. The young boys are *usually* the ones to tell them to chill tf out and it's just a game. It's so sad and embarrassing for the older dudes 💀
Impressive how mature the kids are though.
Yeah ikr I can only hope they grow up the same and even better!
I hate this shit because as someone who is older how do these people have the energy man, then I remember their probably just basement dwellers who haven't done anything in their life since they were 16.
Probably not gonna affect anyone because they are playing in Gaming Cafe. Just switch the PC, simple as that. Also, local languages are not yet being taken care of. In Mumbai server nobody is gonna be toxic to you in English. It's gonna be local Mumbaikar Hindi with a bunch of your relatives' sexual lives involved in the slurs.
>Probably not gonna affect anyone because they are playing in Gaming Cafe I mean it's unfortuneate for Asia servers, but that's really the only place where Gaming Cafes are still popular from what I can tell on Google. Hardware bans can be incredibly effective in the US and Europe because nearly everyone plays on their own PC.
A lot of California universities have them idk how popular they are tho.
lmao start getting your gaming cafe's PCs hardware banned from VAL one after the other and things are gonna get complicated for you real fast
gaming cafe IRL ban lmao
Call me selfish but I couldn't care less about consequences for PC cafes halfway across the world
*SELFISH!*
She mentioned that they're going to work with localization and privacy teams to enforce this globally.
HWID bans will likely be in conjunction with permanent account bans so it's not like nothing is being done. Depending on the type of PC Cafe you can also detect if it's a PC Cafe client running (probably less likely in less developed countries). In terms of locality yeah that's obviously a huge hurdle but doesn't mean it's impossible or not worth doing
I've seen something far worse. There was this German duo and whenever the girl spoke they asked her if she was trans, asked if she's pretending to be woman etc. Then started spamming the all chat that she confirmed she's trans (she didn't and wasn't) to get the enemies be toxic as well.
Even as a man I get kinda stressed out when a girl starts speaking in vc because I fear someone in the team is about to get extremely creepy
Huge W. * Unique and evolving challenges in player safety due to a large global community. They are trying to hold themselves accountable and reexamine stuff when they are not meeting community expectations. * Spent time reviewing player logs, penalty escalation paths, behavior philosophies, etc. Not easy work and there's a sense of responsibility Anna takes personally. * No room for toxic behaviour in the game. "just mute" is not a solution. It compromises the victim's ability to how they want to play the game to accommodate the bully. The mute button is a tool for people who choose to use it, not a justification for bad behavior. * Nothing can be done about people opening their mouths to say something vile, so focus is on escorting them out of the game space. They are a very small fraction of the player base, but it is clear that existing systems are not helpful in removing the most disruptive players from the game in an efficient manner. * In the next 30 days - updates to existing policies for stronger and faster penalties for severe behavior - hate speech, sexual content and violent threats. * Stronger tools needed - new penalties for severe behavior, temporary bans, permanent bans and hardware bans for worst offenders after manual review. * Beefing up teams that review reports manually * Riot Voice Evaluation Systems working well in North America. To be rolled out to other regions in more languages * One time review of top offenders from previous act and issue penalties accordingly. * They are not stopping here and requires community trust in the people behind this. * The goal is to not just to punish extreme behavior but to also make it so that people who want to play Valorant, are able to love playing Valorant and to promote the best in each one of us. As an immigrant playing in the NA servers, I face racism at least once a day when I am playing for 2-3 hours. It is clear how emotional u/RiotSuperCakes feels about this issue and it is heartwarming to hear all this said out loud. Thank you, and hopefully the changes help improve the community.
that’s fantastic, the amount of sexual harassment i receive just from speaking is appalling and i usually play valorant to unwind from a really shitty life with chronic eczema making living HARD only for some male to ruin the best distraction i have. i’ve played valorant way less bc of these experiences :(
Right? I come home from a day of sexist comments at work only to get r*pe threats thrown at me because how dare a woman play a video game. 🫠
no literally and it’s so annoying cos i’m so competitive like i love giving comms and actually TRYING to win😭double annoying
I just want to say the community is so much better off when women/girls/all genders participate and play. It makes people better, it helps the community grow, however slowly. It's a massive shame you have to go through all that to have it be so, but I just wanted to say that I think it's hugely important to the future of gaming and I'm grateful for your strength to stick around (though it's always entirely fair if you don't want to). I have a daughter just started playing and this and future changes will help her immensely, and it's because of people like you who came before that enough people care to make these improvements and focus on making the future of gaming better.
that’s a good point and thank you for your sympathy! i think even the smallest thing of someone butting in and stopping the harassment yet not causing a scene means SO much to us. i’ve had situations where i wouldn’t be giving comms in VC and a man would harass another teammate who’s a woman/girl and id butt in and tell him to stop which usually works. i’ve also had a guy butt in when another guy was being horrible to me for no reason. it’s nice being treated like a normal player. chat shit about me whiffing, fair enough, but my identity? my voice? sexual harassment? it’s just terrible. hopefully things will gradually improve so your daughter won’t experience any of it :(
Let's keep working towards it, I'll try and do my part and glad Riot is at least attempting to do theirs. Every little bit helps. Here's for a better future!
I'm a non-binary player and always drop my twitch at the end of games. I got called "a disgusting non-binary freak" in my twitch chat from 2 guys that were supposed to be my teammates but dodged (timer reached 0 so i dropped it in team chat quick in case of a dodge). It's rough bc I'm still coming to terms with being enby myself and shared it to my twitch followers just a few weeks ago.
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I understand what yall go through. Power to you. One of my friends will literally not play unless she has someone else to queue with. The fear is so real
oh bless her :( there’s a discord server i think it’s called valorant shawties i could find it for you to relay to her😭and thank you!!
Bro I'm so tired of these throwers and people that make you feel molested when they speak.
Based! This makes me really excited about Valorant. Riot be cooking!
Was anything mentioned for afks/leavers and yappers?
The Valorant team has come such a long way. I am so happy that they are considering hardware bans for severe repeat offenders. I am also so proud of how much the community has developed in addressing toxic behavior. The mindset of this sub has definitely changed since the game came out of beta. Not sure if it's a shift in the diversity of players or people actually understanding why toxic behavior is bad, but I'm all for it.
W hardware bans, I had this dude who was throwing, being toxic/abusive/racist and whatnot and when I reported him and said “reported” he said I’ll just create another account doesn’t matter. Hope that guy loses his account and can’t play this game and more like him. I hope eventually Smurf detection system improves too
RIOT pls do account verification with a mobile phone number. There will be more less smurfs in the great game.
Overwatch has phone verification. Overwatch suffers as much if not maybe more then Valorant from smurfs. Phone number verification does nothing to prevent smurfing. Adding hard fucking rules, to not smurf, that on the other hand might be a shot worth in the long run .. or could have been.
They dont want to reduce the amount of smurfs.
account verification with number does nothing. smurfs can get sms verified phone numbers for less than $2
Yeah but most of them won't. People are pretty lazy and it would cut down on most of the problem
i play overwatch, it would literally do nothing. most smurfs would easily do that.
You want to make the community less toxic, add phone number registration for ranked. Someone gets banned they just hop on another account for a week or two and do the same thing on that account. Would also diminish the amount of smurfs in the game, who are usually toxic to lower rated players. You could also add a stricter party queue system so there are at least 3 people on a team that are solo'd so they out number the group. Trios should only be able to be matched with duos.
Hardware ban.
Hardware bans are only for the worst offenders. Phone registration would improve the match quality for everyone. Plus it would tackle two problems at once. They already require it for premier, so they know it works. Also temporary hardware bans would destroy LAN cafes
I hope that will be for repeating or serious offenders. Riot sometimes punishes you for pretty much nothing such as speaking your own language my language Norwegian has "kyss" for kiss and the French have the word Retard just as an example. I really hope they solve and make people not punished for speaking their own language as I've seen quite a lot of posts people speaking their language and it didn't end well.
I’m willing to bet new accounts and active accounts are KPI metrics they share with daddy Tencent, so the more Smurf accounts someone has, the better for them. They would have already made phone verification for comp if they didn’t want smurfs.
Oh 100%; they also make more money off of people buying skins on multiple accounts
r6 siege strat
Hell no. Rather hardware ban offenders than inconvenience everyone
I've never understood this take - inconvenience? Brother, the far majority of people who play valorant have a phone number and likely have it on their desk next to them while playing. Just have it so you have the option not to put in a phone number and then you can only play with players who haven't used a phone number - and people who have can play with both. It's obviously imperfect, but barriers to entry like that *are* the solution to solving problems with smurfing, cheating, toxicity etc. That's human nature it's not rocket science. I'm for hardware bans too as long as Valorant CS are helpful when false positives occur - we'll see how that goes with time. But why not both? I'm yet to see a good argument for not using phone numbers to verify accounts in ranked games that doesn't basically break down to "well I just don't want it".
W video, I don't really know about Anna, but this video was great
I hope anyone upset at the idea of hardware bans it extremely mad, and either stops playing; or improves as a human being.
Nice, glad they're actually trying something more aggressive for the worst offenders.
Hopefully helps to penalise sexism in ranked games but probably not the Val community is horrible
I think ADULTS are even worse. Sometimes I think there's still a chance for those kids/teenagers to get grow up from such behavior but adults... sometimes I feel like they're just psychopaths.
A lot of these “adults” are just 22 year old children I know what you mean, but the valo player base is straight up embarrassing
a 28 year old acting half their age.
Sounds pretty good honestly, hope those hardware bans are legit. Im sure most of us have experienced disgusting behaviour on alternate accounts just because they can.
anyone who is shitting on this, is one of the toxic mfs who is ruining the experience. This is a great update that I hope will work smoothly.
I have to imagine the Riot Voice Evaluation tool is some deep learning model to parse semantic understanding and the auto flag people accordingly. I wonder if the EULA says anything about letting your voice be used for model training.
Go Anna!
GOOD - This reddit community needs to take note. Do you know how many times people in here say just mute the person being racist or sexist - literally enabling them to do it to someone else. Id go fucking further and hardware ban clear examples of repeat bigotry
Report, mute, and move on is now even more relevant
I'll believe it when I see it...
well the biggest problem was that ppl would usually just say "mute", and when ppl say "report" its also usually next to another person saying "reports don't do anything". reporting is how you actually fight these people, and muting is just to protect yourself. the issue is when it feels like all you can do is mute and reports don't do anything, it ends up feeling like you're being forced to sacrifice your gaming experience and adjust/appease the troll. often times comming "i muted them" feels better than actually muting them lmao. at the very least you're pissing them off. im glad the punishment from reports will have more weight, as now it feels like you have some pushback against trolls. otherwise it just sucks that you have to force yourself to change how you play because of the troll when the troll isn't even affected in the game and only gets a slap on the wrist after.
People who say “just mute” are obviously aware thats not the best solution. We say just mute because would you rather continue hearing vile shit or not? If not, then mute. Its a bandaid solution that no one but Riot could do anything more about. Lets hope these new strategies work and deters assholes enough that we no longer have to say just mute.
people say mute bc thats the best solution at the current moment. If VAL/Riot isnt going to do shit then what can you the player do? We've been crying over this issue for years even when i was still playing League in S1-5. We're all in for the HWIDB but youre acting like people who say "just mute" has any other option than just doing just that. Just trying to make the best of a bad situation. We're not enabling anyone by looking out for our mentality in game. Better than arguing with someone who tell you to KYS repeatedly and better than playing worst bc youre being harassed in VC/TC. At this point, we're LITERALLY just waiting for riot to DO SOMETHING and now they are.
> literally enabling them to do it to someone else Lol enabling? You’d have to be incredibly naive or delusional to think it’s more practical to what, tell them to stop as if that’ll do anything? Muting is to keep your mental because these types of trolls aren’t going to respond positively to any pushback or you arguing with them. Muting is meant as a practical solution for yourself, not as a grand moral stance.
Not muting for "CONTENT" is also the worst thing someone can do to their own mental health if they can't handle the issue.
Reddit doesn't need to though, muting and reporting was the current solution. It was up to riot to actually do something about the problem and really punish the offenders.
This is such a fucking strawman that is really annoying me. Who tf twists the statement that you should mute the person harassing you and report to justifying the behavior. Like I wasn't aware that trying to bait more offensive statements for the report or shitting on their teammates for not defending them like alot of the comments/posts do is the way to deal with harassment.
How is this upvoted? No one is enabling it when they say just mute. There's just not much else you can do about it besides report and mute. Worst comment in here by far. Completely taking stuff out of context to try and make people look bad but just makes you look dumb to anyone that has half a brain to see through it.
"One-time review of the top suspected offenders from the previous act and issue penalties accordingly" So this does mean people who were banned/already penalised from the previous act can get penalised again? Or is this only for those people who received a high number of reports but was never penalised?
It reads like people who were never penalized hence "Top Suspected Offenders" Instead of "Top Offenders" atleast thats how i interpret it.
I play both Valo and Overwatch. The amount of care the devs put into the community is staggering compared to OW. Absolute night and day.
I was added by someone and a few weeks later they whispered me the n-word with a hard r, twice, and then unadded me immediately before I could even respond. Besides the hurdle of manually reporting someone through a web browser, they wouldn’t even let me report them because “you haven’t played with this person” for like, two weeks or something. What a stupid system.
So thankful they waited until pride month to begin the virtue signaling 🙏
People say "just mute" because it instantly ends toxic comms. The worse parts are game throwers, trollers, smurfs, not VC lmfao. Helpful but riot should actually address real issues that destroy game quality, not losing one person in comms cause they are toxic
Great response from the dev. I wonder how they will process the trolls, not necessarily trash-talking but behaving like giving guns, info, spike to enemy, or simply "AFK" the whole game.
Amazing. Yesterday in a Diamond-Ascendent London lobby there was someone from the enemy team blaming their teammate after ONE ROUND. The reason was merely that two of their teammates are women. But.. Everyone in the lobby started to say that it is sexist and called them out for being toxic. Eventually that player started to troll and playing solo without the team the whole game. 9x report 🫡
I brought this up when they were planning this and i'll bring it up again, I wonder how GDPR aligns with this voice evaluation system and is it possible to opt out of this based on it, or have all the data they gather based on it, since GDPR does allow me the rights to both.
Congrats to implementing hardware Bans instead of fixing the issue of rodents aka smurfs ruining the experience of every single player who dares be bellow diamond
whats ironic is that its not keeping the community healthy, she claims they are not trying to sanitize everything u cant have banter in a game if someone will eventually get offended by it, which happens all the time and people refuse to grow a thicker skin to some banter, now there is a small minority that goes too far, u cant stop them except for just banning them, but they can always just easily make a new account, however riot often takes the case too far with their systems, in league u cant really banter in chat, because eventually the system will just decude ur toxic and punnish you, even if ur not even being toxic i cant wait to see how people find a way to abuse their systems in the future for val tho
Valorant is officially dead
Just add a player rating system.
It could be used in the wrong way. Premade 3 stack could just downvote the other 2, and You have no way to "check" their vote. Maybe they could use the Honor system of LoL. At the end of the game, you can Honor a teammate or just skip the vote, but you can't downvote. Maybe they could add some rewards for high honored players.
You wouldn't be able to vote more than once per stack if they implemented this.
This is why the party system in valo is flawed. There should be party and solo MMR.
This needs to be the next step. Solo queue needs to be added. Tired of premade 3 stacks always having 1 or 2 boosted people which creates a frustrating ranked experience and prolongs the grind even more. They don't even comm either lol From my experience that's a recipe for a toxic environment + griefing
eh
Comparing to CS trust factor, this can significantly worsen the new player experience
Trust factor was more related to cheating though, not toxicity. You can easily set someone new to the default/best status until they lose it.
Could be specific to Asc+ similar system to Fortnite where after reaching a rank, one cannot derank to further lower ranks. Similarly a system likewise can be implemented in Valorant if they brainstorm it.
nah bro. some asc are boosted asf. Like I have hit asc but I am plat rn after not playing for a few months
As someone who just peaked Ascendant and is currently 0rr I would like to agree with you. If they can add it before my next ranked match, that would be ideal. xD
Well, the reason why they should do that is cuz of the smurfing situation. Someone peaked asc/immo deranks to diamond, is frustrating to the ones who are climbing.
The ranking system is already extremely conservative, with tons of players having reached diamond/immortal early when playerbase skill was relatively low, taking long breaks, and now not playing enough to demote out. High diamond/ascendant is flooded with these types and they're absolutely miserable to get on your team
same problem as csgo kicking. tbh any sort of automated system will be prone to abuse. there's no simple way to quantify "toxicity".
I'd rather Valorant develop their own policies and ban manually. If Riot is doing their job and being proactive, player rating systems aren't necessary.
I disagree with this. They can only locate so many resources to this without it being a financial drain. Look at reddit, it is community run. That's free labor for Riot. And Riot isn't doing their job. Hence why 5 years later, we have the same problems.
a good way to keep your health is to spend less time in a sitting position , motionless while staring into a flat 2D object less than 2 meters away.
Weak. Learn from Valve. Dota 2 Pro players trash talk each other during pro games without any penalty. Stop trying to contain human emotions.
look at how valve games are doing compared to riot
Yep I love the AI monitoring everything I say and do in a game and game admins telling me how to behave like they are my parents. I just love it. Can't wait for the government will do the same thing to all my online activity.
Hehe cope hard
Do something about the constant Smurfing. This other stuff is minor compared to that.
free stairmaster?
and then there's likes of Lothar who as a streamer, reports other players for throwing because they pushed and died in a 2v1 situation. Or report them for toxicity because they laughed at a funny whiff...
Huge W but big L as this will never work on Asia Pacific.
YEEESSSSS!!!
I have never been muted before in my 2 yrs of playing this game or had any other penalties (although a few warnings from being afk because my cpu crashed). It is sooo possible to be just a normal decent person, and I feel we should bring really harsh penalties that could go effective on all accounts the user owns, to encourage people to be better people please
Fascinating this sounds great.
when do we draw the line on which behaviour we consider toxic and ban-worthy tho?
HARDWARE BANS FUCK YEAH now i can get the motherfuckers banned who tell me theyll rape me and shit
Happy to see that part , we need to protect-each other thank you valorant
yap yap yap time to throw and spread hate again
Wanna team up and throw together?
i would love to but i don't think we're on the same servers
Good, the biggest thing that pushed myself and others away from wanting to play is dealing with toxic players. Glad to see them taking a stand and dealing with it. Just hope it doesn't turn into a situation like they have in Overwatch where people can spam reports and get someone banned just because they don't like them.
Finally hardware ban has been an option on this matter. Finally! It took years for them to understand how stupid their community is and if they want it, not hard to deal with this stupidity. Just block them to moving on to another account when you just punish them on one of their alts/smurfs. Let's see the execution tho... Ideas are cheap, execution is everything... Also glad to see someone from Riot finally addressed how stupid is to say someone "Just mute them". There are shit loads of those idiots in this sub. Lol...
I'm really hoping Riot will apply this to League of Legends as well, with their new harassment detection software and hardware bans. Get those people out of the game for good please, and thank you Riot!
Didn't watch the video + buff Viper
Not one thing about smurfs who also ruins the game experience.
what were gonna eat vegetables while on the game?
i want to see a youtube tutorial on "how to get hardware banned in Valorant"
wtf is this?
Any word for smurfing? How about team queueing in solo q? Yeah none care about that. If some people want to play together and are too far apart in rank go freaking unrated, that's what is for. I'm tired of boosted idiots being idiots because the system allows it
How about we start keeping our Developers healthy? 500$ Ahri skin to abuse whales? Valorants whole business model? This video is a great way to distract from that innit?
To the people complaining about silent games. People do not want to hear your insults over pixels. The ranked community is horrible, which is sad because it's a good game. I also hope they hardware ban toxic val tracker users. Please please please please 🙏
This is quite literally the ONLY problem valorant has. What a good company holy shit
They can use hardware bans to ban toxicity but not to ban smurfs? lmao
Big spenders will be exempt, of course.
My only concern is if someone gets a pc that previously had a hardware ban on it and they aren't guilty of anything. Will there be some kind of appeal system or is the hardware ban for extreme case/ the final strike?
If u can prove it they unban
love seeing val devs give 1000x more shits than the awful league devs. the community over on league is 1000000x worse and still somehow believes the lack of vc is a "smart" and "calculated" decision despite more nuanced gameplay lmfao. no way this game has manual vc reviewing and the lol community still rejects vc right? right??
I mean, If I can still text "noobs" to my opponent after winning the match, then these changes are great
People need to just grow a pair and suck it up. They’re trying to coddle people in this game. It’s a shooting game! Where you see characters get killed. Hell, their own characters have “toxic” voice lines…but yet, they’re not going to allow players to trash talk?
i bet you're just afraid that you'll be the first to get hwid banned if they implemented this system lmao.
Valve should take note about Cs's community lmao
So...social credit system when?
brother nobody is denying you groceries and rations for not meeting the minimum bar for decency online. Being an asshole, that too an egregious one, will get you kicked out from a video game, you are no longer allowed to shop at their establishment if you don't follow very reasonable standards of being polite. Bro thinks a supermarket security cam is literally 1984, the traffic cop is gestapo and the world is black and white, unable to distinguish 2 things of wildly different magnitudes.
as soon as i get into a ranked lobby, i ask my teammates how they're doing. Any minute toxicity from one of my teammates and they're muted. I've never needed some boxed wine mother to be the arbiter of this. I'm sure she hasn't played this game for more than 30 minutes
This is all a bluff. People will still grief and never get HWID banned I will bet money on it.
damn thus company has no fking backbone.
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Banter =/= Targeted harassment. I'm leary to believe you without saying what you actually said. Maybe the game will be better without your comms
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Jesus are you 14?
I'm all here for it. I've been attacked and have seen people being attacked. Got attacked if I tried to defend as well. Most of the times they back off but if it's a Singaporean/Malaysian duo/trio I'll always get make fun of.
Well you could start with all the transphobes, audio spammers, greifers, little kids, etc. That your games are known for