Ranked in games like Valorant can be incredibly frustrating, thanks to the toxicity that comes with anonymity. Having good comms is often the difference between victory and defeat. After all, if you can’t coordinate quickly and easily in an fps as intense as Valorant, you aren’t going to be able to work together. Instead, more players than not have teammates that swear, send death threats, or harass the other players for their gender/skill/etc. The current system isn’t good enough to stop people from being toxic. 

Riot Games is working on some solutions. Will they be the piece to the puzzle to make Valorant fun to play for everyone?

Women probably have the worst time in Valorant. When a girl speaks up in the chat, it’s time to start harassing them or claim they’re boosted immediately. We in no way condone that, but that is sadly what happens. According to Riot BrightEyez, players who are chat banned will not be able to play ranked within the next two-three patches!

This was confirmed on Reddit: “We will be preventing players who have been penalized with chat and voice restrictions from playing ranked in the next two to three patches. We are actively working on the tech, it’s taking a little bit longer than anticipated, but we are committed to building it.”

Riot Games also posted this move to lower toxicity in Valorant’s ranked scene via Twitter. Other measures are coming to Valorant as well, to help reduce toxicity. The penalty system will reportedly be far more robust to help cut back on toxicity in Valorant, whether it’s ranked or otherwise. We don’t know what the situation will be, but we have some thoughts on it. Players merely being unable to play branked for the duration of their chat ban in Valorant, for toxicity or otherwise is perhaps not enough. If I had my way, they’d be banned from ranked for a longer time.

This duration would grow with each additional penalty. Would this likely lead to people making accounts, grinding them, and just being jerks, knowing they can play on another free account? Possibly. I wonder how hard it would be to have players’ IP banned from creating/logging into new accounts. That’s just hypothetical. Either way, toxicity is bad in Valorant’s ranked scene, so we’d love to see more solutions like this to make sure players are decent to each other. It’s a shame we have to see such things appear. If people could not be rotten, it wouldn’t be necessary, but here we are.