Eradicating cheating, toxicity, and disruptive behavior from online multiplayer games is a never-ending task, and it’s pretty much impossible to stamp out entirely. However, some games fare better than others when it comes to tackling the issue, and in Valorant’s case, it became super aggressive in cracking down on players behaving badly last year. In a new dev diary, Riot Games reveals that it sent out manual warnings to “over half a million” Valorant players for disruptive behavior alone.
With the FPS game’s top dog, executive producer Anna Donlon, saying in May 2024 that Riot “needs to do better” when it comes to tackling harassment and toxicity in Valorant, a few new systems and stricter punishments for this kind of behavior were rolled out throughout the rest of the year. A big part of that has been increasing the number of manual reviews carried out by Riot and sending out more warning messages to offenders much earlier. According to Stephen Kraman, Valorant’s product lead for competitive systems, this approach has been working.
“We sent out warning notices to over half a million players that were all repeat disruptors in our game,” he says. “Any players that continued to be disruptive, they received harsher penalties than [was] typical.”
Kraman claims that the warnings alone helped drop the rate of repeated disruption by 25% – that’s without having to actually ban players and lock them out of the game for a period of time. The swiftness, and sternness, of these warnings appear to have been pretty effective.
However, Kraman acknowledges that there’s still plenty of work to do, and that another manual system to help stamp out negative behaviors should be arriving in the near future. He also updates players on Valorant’s voice comm evaluation tech – English language detection has now been rolled out to every country where you can play Valorant aside from Korea. Spanish language support is next up and is “furthest along in development,” with support for other languages also in the works.
Elsewhere in the new dev diary, Riot confirms that we’ll be getting two more new agents this year following the release of Tejo in today’s Season 2025 Act 1 update. Map rotation is also going to increase in frequency to once every Act, and with six Acts billed for this year, that means things should be switched up roughly every two months or so.
Ahead of your next match, make sure you check out our guides to the best Valorant crosshairs and the Valorant ranks you’ll be climbing in competitive play.
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