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Competitive multiplayer games and a toxic community, name a more iconic duo. As Valorant is one such multiplayer game, there is plenty of toxicity and hostility to be found. Well, the developers of the game at Riot Games are getting fed up with it all and are looking into ways of combating toxicity.
A new update from the Valorant team talks about what they are doing to make the game more welcoming to all sorts of players. They talk about what sort of crappy behaviors are detected automatically, why player reports are important, and what they are doing in the future to combat ongoing issues.
Just in January alone, the devs say that they banned over 40,000 players from the game alone. Part of the team's plan is to dish out harsher punishments for existing systems. There will also be more immediate moderation and improvements to existing voice moderation. Valorant does record in-game voice communications, so don't think that you can get away with being an abusive jerk there either.
First are chat mutes, the most common form of initial punishment that we administer for alarming text or voice comms. In January alone, we administered over 400,000 text and voice chat restrictions in the form of a mute. These are automatically triggered when a player types something in chat that we detect as abusive, or when enough reports have accumulated over time (from different players in different games) such that we have strong confidence that a player is abusing text and/or voice.
The road doesn’t end here! Please note that we are working on improving this model so we can confidently detect more words that may be currently dodging the system. We’ll continue to push for improvements on this front.
GAME RESTRICTIONS
Next up are game restrictions. These are bans that we place on accounts that commit numerous, repeated instances of toxic communication. The bans could range from a few days (for smaller violations by relatively new offenders), to year-long (for chronic offenders). Permanent bans are reserved for if the behavior is especially egregious and/or repeated.
These bans didn’t ramp up on VALORANT until around the middle of last year (we were trying to make sure bans were fully justified). In January, we dished out over 40,000 bans.
One last point of data we’d like to share: the above numbers are indicators of behaviors that we caught and punished, but not necessarily an indication that toxicity in VALORANT has gone down as a result. In fact, when we surveyed players, we noticed that the frequency with which players encounter harassment in our game hasn’t meaningfully gone down. Long story short, we know that the work we’ve done up to now is, at best, foundational, and there’s a ton more to build on top of it in 2022 and beyond.
The road doesn’t end here! Please note that we are working on improving this model so we can confidently detect more words that may be currently dodging the system. We’ll continue to push for improvements on this front.
GAME RESTRICTIONS
Next up are game restrictions. These are bans that we place on accounts that commit numerous, repeated instances of toxic communication. The bans could range from a few days (for smaller violations by relatively new offenders), to year-long (for chronic offenders). Permanent bans are reserved for if the behavior is especially egregious and/or repeated.
These bans didn’t ramp up on VALORANT until around the middle of last year (we were trying to make sure bans were fully justified). In January, we dished out over 40,000 bans.
One last point of data we’d like to share: the above numbers are indicators of behaviors that we caught and punished, but not necessarily an indication that toxicity in VALORANT has gone down as a result. In fact, when we surveyed players, we noticed that the frequency with which players encounter harassment in our game hasn’t meaningfully gone down. Long story short, we know that the work we’ve done up to now is, at best, foundational, and there’s a ton more to build on top of it in 2022 and beyond.
