VALORANT System Health Series-Voice and Chat Toxicity: What is Riot Games doing to reduce toxicity?

 ZX, Riot’s Developer Team Lead, Anna Donlon has tweeted that Riot is currently working on reducing the Valorant toxicity players face in-game. She shares what progress they have and what they are currently working on.

The number one issue of any online multiplayer is toxicity. It has always existed in every virtual multiplayer game and developers are yet to find a solution. Even in Riot’s flagship FPS, VALORANT.

Generally toxic abuse, racism, sexism, and homophobic comments are something that all players have experienced. Even prompting the queen of Twitch, Pokimane herself to pretend to be a man in voice chat as an experiment.

In response to this, Anna Donlon had tweeted about Riot working on a system similar to LoL and Overwatch on January 16. It had a lot of speculation as to what the system would be and how it will change the future of the game.

 

The time has come where Anna Donlon has finally shared updates on the system and what will be implemented in the game.

Also read: VALORANT is reportedly working on a system similar to Overwatch and LoL to reduce toxicity

New implementations and possible updates to reduce toxicity

Social and Players Dynamic team members, @npcSara and @_bchangalang have shared their progress on the progress. They firstly share what they have done so far and what results in it has had. Secondly, they share what they look to do in the future.

WHAT HAS RIOT DONE SO FAR?

• Player feedback- The team members have shared that they have tweaked their system on reports sent in. Rather than focusing on newer systems first, they chose to better and improve their current system by looking through reports. “Similarly, we’ve created an internal “comms rating” for each player in VALORANT, so that those who commit repeat offenses are very quickly dealt with.”, released in the Riot article.
• Muted words list- In the past players have found creative ways to bypass the Muted Words List. Taking this in consideration Riot will now allow players to manually enter which words they want to censor. They have even improved the filtration system for this list making it harder to bypass the system.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM RIOT IN THE FUTURE?

• Generally harsher punishments for existing systems
• More immediate, real-time text moderation
• Improvements to existing voice moderation

Also read: “He was faster to apologize to me, than Ninja and Jessica Blevins”: Pokimane talks about the JiDion’s and Ninja controversy