Valorant: Riot Responds To Those Hindered By Teammates With Communications Ban

Riot has had issues with toxic players since Valorant launched, and the developer is looking into how it'll deal with individuals that are reported by other players within the game.

Players can be reported to Riot at present, and eventually be investigated by the developer, which can result in bans from playing the game entirely, or elements such as communication. That's causing some issues for the team-based shooter, which relies heavily on voice or text chat in order to formulate strategies.

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Valorant Players Complain About Communication Bans For Other Players

That means that if you're playing in a ranked scenario, there's every chance you won't be able to plan out each round due to another player on your team having had their communications privileges revoked, making players feel as though they're being punished for another player's behaviour.

A Valorant player took to Reddit to make that exact argument, and got a response from the dev team, too. “If you randomly get a banned player, your [communications] get hurt a lot. Why is this even a thing? If someone's terribly toxic, you can just mute them,” u/silenthills13 noted.

In response, Riot_Revenancer explained that “What we have today isn't what we intend to be the final solution and we're working on making it better."

“I'll admit that we probably underestimated the negative effect on teammates of having a comms muted player and that's something that we're going to think more about.”

"To be honest, Valorant is new for Riot and we're going to have to learn how to work with it. It would be dishonest to pretend we don't draw on our data from LoL (there are very few established industry conventions on behaviour problems)".

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"This sort of conversation is actually really helpful for me to hear in understanding what's going on in the ecosystem and I take it to heart so don't hesitate to raise concerns."

For what it's worth, I stopped playing Valorant for two reasons. The first is that I'm simply not very good at the game, but the second is that the community is so unwilling to accept newcomers that it felt almost impossible to learn the ropes.

Here's hoping that Riot can work on a new system - perhaps one that takes notes from Fall Guys and pits toxic players against one another?

For more on Valorant, be sure to check out the latest weapon skins here, as well as developers teasing a pick and ban system for agents.