Riot announced on Feb 15 that they will be cracking down on AFKing and offensive language in their upcoming patches. Changes are set to occur as early as the next patch, patch 2.03.
Goodbye, AFK Trolls
Players of VALORANT know the all-too-often struggle of queuing into a match just to find out that at least one, if not more of their players have gone AFK. By being even one player down, a team struggles to compete against a full team of five players. As VALORANT’S development team stated in their update message, “Over the past several months, we’ve focused much of our efforts on a problem we know is painful to you: AFKs. Even one AFK’d player can turn the tide of a game, and it’s discouraging to know that you’ll have to carry twice as hard for a chance to win.” They have recognized the occurring problem after hearing players’ complaints and have been focusing on the issue for a long time. These efforts have finally come to fruition.
The difference is that now each individual player account will have its behavior tracked and recorded. This decision will be helpful in recognizing patterns of purposeful AFK offenses as well as assist in distinguishing the intent of AFKing from accidental disconnections from the servers.
Penalties can include the following:
- Warnings
- XP denial for the games in which you were AFK’d (see ya later, AFK farmers!)
- Small deductions from your ranked rating for pre-game dodges
- Deductions from your ranked rating for in-game AFKing (Patch 2.03)
- Increased queue restrictions
- Barred entry from ranked games
- VALORANT game bans (but only if you’re really, really persistent)
Basically, what they are saying is that they are covering the loopholes of persistent AFK’ers and are ready to make sure that VALORANT gameplay is fair for all of its players. Hopefully, with these measures in place, there will be less moments of “Ugh, now I have to carry for this 3v5.” and more “wow, I’m ready to work with this full team.”
No Room for Raging
The message from developers also outlined plans for later patches to target chat- based offenses on two fronts. One, set for patch 2.04, to tackle text-based offenses, and two, for reporter feedback (set for patch 2.05).
The future crackdown on chat-based offenses for text will include harsher penalties:
- Warnings
- Comms bans
- Extended comms bans
- Ranked queue bans
- Game bans
- Extended game bans
They warn players: “Let us be crystal clear: there is no room for violence, threats, or targeted harassment in VALORANT—those behaviors will not be tolerated.” This is a good thing to keep in mind, especially with the information that their system cannot distinguish which player began raging with hateful language first. It is important to remember that raging players are honestly not worth your time. The better response is to report them (which will later provide you with an update come patch 2.05 potentially), and of course… mute them. Instead of taking it out in the chat, take it out in the matches. Gameplay is far more worthwhile than exchanging hateful comments with a player who is too preoccupied with raging instead of playing the game.
Reporter feedback set for patch 2.05 will be extremely helpful in this manner. VALORANT developers plan to notify players when their reports have been acted upon. The development team is taking harassment and AFKing very seriously, and by providing feedback on reports, players will be actively aware that their report has been noticed as well as dealt with accordingly.
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