Valorant Toxicity: Riot to Roll Out Hardware Bans

Riot Games has acknowledged that its efforts to curb toxicity in Valorant have fallen short, with head Anna Donlon admitting the studio has “failed” to adequately protect players. In a developer update, Donlon outlined a series of stronger moderation measures, including faster penalties, hardware bans, and expanded voice evaluation, to be rolled out over the coming months.

Stronger, Faster Penalties

Within the next 30 days, Riot will finalize policy updates that focus on “severe, harmful” behavior, promising faster penalties and explicitly including hardware bans. The company will also increase manual review capacity to support these escalated actions. Additionally, Riot plans to conduct a one-time review of the top suspected offenders from the previous act and issue penalties accordingly.

Voice Evaluation Expansion

Riot began collecting in-game voice communications in North America in July 2022 as part of its anti-toxicity efforts. Now, the company is expanding its voice evaluation systems to additional regions later this year, without specifying which ones.

Zero-Tolerance Text Detection

When the system detects text that violates Riot’s zero-tolerance policy, the message will be blocked from being posted, and the offending player will be muted for the remainder of the match. This policy applies to what Riot calls “evil statements under the guise of shit talk,” which the company says are not welcome.

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