Posted in: Games, Riot Games, Valorant, Video Games | Tagged: Riot Games, Valorant
Riot Games Pledges To Curb Valorant Harassment After Dev Post
It doesn't matter what multiplayer game you play, you're going to find harassment, and Valorant is no exception. We've been playing the beta ourselves for a couple of weeks now, and it seems every other game comes with the complimentary jerk who is there to remind you how much of a n00b you are followed by some kind of sexist, racist, homophobic commentary they can muster. Because they're hidden behind a username with no consequences and nowhere else to put their anger except on faceless players in the void. Will they get reported? Sure. But it doesn't really stop the problem as it is more common among the general playerbase of most online multiplayer games than people care to admit. This brings us to a recent set of social media posts that went up this week from League of Legends UX designer Riot Greenily, who posted about all the harassment she got in Valorant, a game made by the company she works for.
Greenily recently livestreamed her experience playing the game, and depending on the kind of gamer you are, the results will either shock you or will be pretty unsurprising. We're just going to post all of them here so you can see what she experienced, and you can join us again below them.
This eventually lead to other developers taking some time to see if their experience differed, and as you might suspect from the previous set of posts, no, it did not. Riot Aeneia, who is part of the Insights & Strategy team at Riot Games, specifically for Valorant, chimed in with her own experiences. Which included a guy proposing to her.
All of this caused Anna Donlon to respond to what was going on with her own post. Donlon, if you're not aware, is Valorant's Executive Producer. So when you see a post from her, you know it's coming from higher up the food chain in terms of the game's staff.
Will they be able to find a way to curb the problem? We wish them the best of luck in doing so. But considering this has been on developer's radars since the days of Halo 2, and the best response we've ever seen from companies over the years is to either mute the player or report for a ban, anything they come up with at this point would be lovely.