Valorant devs are working on better detection and punishment for “disruptive behaviors”

Every multiplayer has a troller and griefer issue, and Riot Games’ Valorant is no stranger to this fact.

Players in the lower ranks often experience games when one of their teammates go AFK from the very first round. And to make matters worse, there is always one who will vote "no" when a poll for a remake starts, leaving the rest stuck in a 4v5 situation.

Both Competitive and normal matchmaking in Iron, Bronze, and Silver is demotivating the players from grinding the game. The current LP loss/gain system and the alarming number of smurfs that are in the game at the moment are jeopardizing the competitive health of Valorant even further.

This is an issue which the community feels that the Valorant developers need to address, and in their latest blog post, they did just that.

In their Ask Valorant - Dec 04, Riot Games producer Sara Dadafshar answered the questions which asked:

“I would love to know what exactly are you going to do about the AFKs/throwers situation? Harsher punishment? Adding a “leaver rating”?”

Sara opened up about many issues that Valorant has been facing at the moment and touched on some of the future solutions that the devs have planned for “disruptive behavior.”

Better detection and punishment coming to trollers in Valorant

In Ask Valorant - Dec 04, Sara commented that the upcoming patch of 1.14 would be implementing changes to the Competitive system. And players will only be able to queue up for ranked matchmaking after they have won a certain number of games and not just played the said number, which was the previous requirement.

The Valorant devs hope to curb much of the smurfing issue with this and actually force the trollers to “participate in play and strive for wins.”

Sara then went on to say:

“We are working on better detection of this type of behavior that will lead to harsher punishment. We're looking into things like rank penalties, experience mitigations, longer queue time restrictions, and even bans if it comes down to it.

We want to distinguish between disruptive behaviors that stem from comms and gameplay, and then penalize accordingly.”

Valorant’s punishment system has so far been unable to fix much of the matchmaking issues that are prevalent in the game.

Even though Vanguard has been able to quite successfully deal with a good portion of the hacking problem in the game, the Smurfing and griefer pandemic is a whole other ball game. And hopefully, with these upcoming changes, Valorant will get a better play state for both serious and casual players.