Voice chats are both a blessing and a curse. Valorant Executive Producer Anna Donlon says that current measures to combat in-game harassment and threats of any kind are not good enough and addresses the issue in a long post.
How to solve this problem?
This comment was posted in response to a recent incident that received a lot of attention due to the reach of the Twitch streamer involved.
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The streamer experienced serious threats of violence while playing, even in voice chat. This clip has been circulating online since Monday. When she was threatened in the game, she left the match and received the normal punishment – a warning and a loss of experience.
Games with integrated voice communication are particularly prominent examples here. It feels completely different when someone is insulting in text chat versus when someone says it directly to you.
“I'm sorry I didn't post sooner, but please know I didn't miss a word,” Donlon said yesterday. “This has been the most important issue for me (and for many of us) since yesterday. It is important to me that we lead with action first.”
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“So until we've pushed the right buttons and made some necessary internal changes, I didn't want to tweet empty condolences when it's up to us to do the hard work here.”
“I would like to share some of my thoughts on player behavior in games in due course, but I would like to summarize these thoughts for now.”
She also addressed a few words directly to the streamer: “I'm so sorry you had to experience that. We're taking action against this account, but I also know that's not enough.”
“Our teams are constantly working on our behavioral tools, but we still have room for improvement, and we will,” said Donlon, promising that this issue will be addressed as a high priority.
Donlon admits that Riot Games still has a long way to go here. Although measures have already been taken for Valorant, progress has not been discussed for some time. The company is also considering the option of directly blocking all accounts of a perpetrator.
Since I rarely play with random players, I'm lucky that I don't notice too much of this toxicity. I even experienced very friendly lobbies. I often set most people to mute directly in the agent selection. How do you deal with something like that?