A few weeks after several clips of Valorant players harassing women via in-game chat went viral on X (formerly Twitter) and other social media sites, Riot Games has announced its plans to tackle the bad actors. In a seven-minute-long video posted to X, Valorant head Anna Donlon spoke about the team’s responsibility to protect players, the systems currently in place, and future steps the studio will take to hopefully minimise abuse. A message from @RiotSuperCakes about the current state of player behavior and upcoming changes to make our community a better place pic.
twitter.com/eiwoGsB930 Abuse levied via in-game voice chat is not just a Valorant problem, nor is it something Valorant players—often particularly women and queer folks—have just started experiencing. I wrote about how companies weren’t doing enough to combat toxic voice chat nearly a year ago , and was violently reminded of how little has been done yet again this April, when a viral video appeared to show several male Valorant players dogpiling on two women in their match.
And just two weeks ago, Twitch streamer Taylor Morgan shared a clip of a Valorant player asking her mid-match, “Do you know what rape feels like?” Donlon acknowledges that, despite Riot’s valiant efforts, its current “systems can’t catch everything,” and that “they require constant attention and tweaking and improvement” that often has to be “painfully manual or dependent upon players reporting things.” “At the end .
