Posted in: Games, Riot Games, Valorant, Video Games | Tagged: Riot Games, Valorant

Valorant Drops New Backstory For Viper & Stricter Chat Punishment

Riot Games decided to release a new awesome animated video for Valorant this week as we get a far better look at the backstory to Viper. We have the video down at the bottom, but essentially we're getting a short and dangerous look into the character's past and the way that she came up, to a degree. It's not a full five-minute video, mind you, but there's a lot to be seen in the visuals to tell the story. Speaking of toxic things, Riot released a new blog this week detailing the measures they're taking for their voice and text moderation, which includes the warning that harsher punishments will be coming for toxicity in the game. Apparently, it has gotten so bad lately, the team is taking off the kid gloves and is ready to outright ban player accounts for life if they don't shape up. We have some of the details of that below.

PLAYER FEEDBACK

The first form of detection is player feedback—specifically reports! One of the reasons we highly encourage all of you to report bad behavior (whether that be someone abusing chat, or being AFK, or purposely throwing), is because we actively track and use that data to administer punishments. To be clear, this doesn't mean that anyone who gets reported will get punished—we look for repeat offenders and administer escalating penalties that start from warnings and go all the way to permanent bans (when bad enough).

We've talked before about creating player behavior "ratings" when we talked about AFKs in Valorant. 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. On the other hand, there are some things that people type and say in our game that are what we consider "zero tolerance" offenses. These are things that make it clear that, based on what's been said, we simply do not want a player who has committed this offense in Valorant. When we see reports of this type of language being used, we escalate to harsh punishments immediately. (Currently, these punishments happen after the match has ended—more on that later.)

MUTED WORDS LIST

As I am sure some of you have experienced, automatic text detection isn't perfect (players have found pretty "creative" ways to bypass our systems), so there will be times where "zero tolerance" words will get by our detection. For this reason, we recently implemented a "Muted Words List" that allows you to manually filter out words and phrases that you don't want to see in the game.

This serves two functions:

First, knowing that our automatic detection systems aren't perfect, we want to give some agency to you to filter unwanted communication in the game. Second, we plan on incorporating the words that you filtered using the Muted Words List into our automatic detection in future iterations of the system (so in a way, using the Muted Words List will improve our automatic detections in the future!).

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