When it comes to competing online in VALORANT, one of the worst experiences you can have is to be in a close game with a griefer on your team. Griefers are players who are often purposefully losing games to de-rank, usually by just dying quickly or by even trying to kill their own teammates.
Players within the lobby can report these problematic people in an effort to get them in trouble. But the punishments are a bit weaker in VALORANT in comparison to other competitive games—even in Riot Games’ other popular franchise, League of Legends.
Just yesterday, League devs detailed plans to implement stricter punishments for ranked griefers by forcing them to play other game modes before being able to go back into ranked play, among other things.
Related: Riot plans even stricter punishments for LoL griefers in coming months
Riot is aiming to add these changes to League over the next couple of months. But what about VALORANT and its ranked system? Fans on Reddit have been talking about this point specifically and how it feels like the number of players throwing games away is too frequent online around the Gold and Platinum ranks. Plus, much like your regular League match, wasting 30 to 45 minutes of your time on a VALORANT match where you’re effectively at a disadvantage can ruin the mood for an entire night.
As of now, the most consistent way you’ll see players get any sort of punishment in VALORANT ranked games is text chat bans, which are automated. Using slurs or any other forms of harassment and discrimination will lead that player to get chat banned. Yet voice chat is an entirely different space, and that isn’t even talking about gameplay. As the top comment in the Reddit thread by Dandys3017 reads, all players can do currently “is report and move on, or simply find yourself that regular premade team.”
If you don’t have the patience to just report and move on, or if you don’t have a consistent group of four friends to grind ranked play with, this solution likely leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Plus, that doesn’t even address the issue of players having alternate accounts they can swap to after losing games on purpose and getting banned. They do need to get to level 20 to play ranked in VALORANT, but grinding that ahead of time can allow for easy account swaps and more time throwing ranked games.
But considering the way VALORANT already tracks how much utility you use on your teammates, the dev team just needs to take that next step to fight griefing better—and they can look to their fellow League devs for suggestions.
