This is honestly a terrible solution for normal players. If you randomly get a banned player, your comms get hurt a lot. Why is this even a thing? If someone's terribly toxic, you can just mute them. It takes 1 second. But if they're muted by the game, you have to play with them like that for the whole game. Either lock them out of comp for 24 hours or just let players take care of muting others themselves + hand out temporary game bans for those who are super offensive.
External link →Hi, I'm a designer on the central player dynamics group (read: behavior) and my team is involved in the current penalties experience on Valorant, so I want to give a bit of context. Currently, we're only issuing restrictions on comms for a couple reasons:
- When Valorant launched, we started seeing lots of reports of really disruptive behavior particularly in voice and so we prioritized getting out something to protect players from that harm fast rather than wait for the perfect solution. Knowing this is the case, we chose to focus on a what we felt was a softer penalty that has less potential for player harm. What we have today isn't what we intend to be the final solution and we're working on making it better - although I think folks would be mad if I tried to give any sense of when here :P
- More philosophically, our goal is to try to match the type of penalty to the type of offense so as to prevent a disruptive player from causing that type of harm again. Most players who are disruptive in comms are otherwise good players, and banning them is more likely to lead to them creating alt accounts and continuing with the same behavior. In this situation, 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 behavior problems), and some of it isn't going to apply as well. 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.
!pin
Hi, I'm a designer on the central player dynamics group (read: behavior) and my team is involved in the current penalties experience on Valorant, so I want to give a bit of context. Currently, we're only issuing restrictions on comms for a couple reasons:
- When Valorant launched, we started seeing lots of reports of really disruptive behavior particularly in voice and so we prioritized getting out something to protect players from that harm fast rather than wait for the perfect solution. Knowing this is the case, we chose to focus on a what we felt was a softer penalty that has less potential for player harm. What we have today isn't what we intend to be the final solution and we're working on making it better - although I think folks would be mad if I tried to give any sense of when here :P
- More philosophically, our goal is to try to match the type of penalty to the type of offense so as to prevent a disruptive player from causing that type of harm again. Most players who are disruptive in comms are otherwise good players, and banning them is more likely to lead to them creating alt accounts and continuing with the same behavior. In this situation, 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 behavior problems), and some of it isn't going to apply as well. 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.
!pin
Adding on from the Val Competitive perspective, to Revenancer’s point we wanted to do something quickly to address repeat offenders of our code of conduct, and while players can always mute these highly disruptive teammates, that puts the onus on the other 4 players on their team to have to deal with a potential barrage of bad behavior first and personally take action to stop it. Along with that if you mute someone who is already dead set to antagonize you and ignore them, it may lead them to try other more game play impacting ways to ruin your game.
While we want to create an environment where teammates work together and everyone feels safe using voice as a potential tool to do so, to be candid that’s not the case today, and for players who either can’t use voice, aren't comfortable using it, or know that they have/had a hard time controlling their voice behavior we want to provide avenues for them to still compete without absolutely having to use voice by leveraging current systems like shop commands, in-game pings, chat, and we are also exploring potential new systems to help here as well.
We are keeping an eye on this thread too, our thought process here was not around revenue, but around trying to help folks be better teammates while also allowing folks to compete and (up to a certain limit) play their favorite Mode.
devtrackers.gg