No one should have to “grow a thicker skin”: Valorant studio commit to harsh penalties for harassment
No one should have to “grow a thicker skin”: Valorant studio commit to harsh penalties for harassment
Riot games have committed to a series of new measures to curtail harassment and hate-speech in Valorant
I'm all for banning toxic players and cheaters, but the fact that they make you install a rootkit on your system to enable this is too much.
85You have the option not to play the game though. It is not like they force anyone with a gun to install this rootkit.
-53If someone doesn't know what a rootkit is or why it's bad, then they can't give informed consent to it. It's not a free choice for 90% of players.
43Nobody is forced with a gun to play a game with a toxic community either, does that mean it's not worth complaining about? Perhaps the article should mention the supposed tradeoffs required to police such a community. I say supposed because I've played far less toxic games than Vallorant and League that don't require such invasive software. Perhaps Riot should do some introspection and ask why the games they make foster such bad behavior instead of harming nontoxic players with their policing methods.
9
“People are too sensitive today” types are deliberately missing the point. Online is pretty much the only place where you can get away with spouting slurs or psycho shit. You wouldn’t do it in public or get away with most of it in public.
More to the point it's just tiring having these types come into a lobby. They generally don’t (or can’t) play properly or fuck around until someone calls them out. They then start on that person or spamming the N word.
More often than not it feels like they try to frame it as “oh ho, people can’t handle my casual use of slurs, snowflakes”. When more likely is if you’re talking and behaving like that generally it means you’re obnoxious and disruptive to the game.
68Fuck those people. Still not worth getting infected by a rootkit.
16I don’t buy games that run Kernel level software either generally but the two issues are tangentially related. This seems like a problem yesteryears algorithms plus monitoring staff could have solved. The problem is the latter cost money and doesn’t generate profit. LLM/ML makes this feasible again I suspect.
5being forced to infect yourself with a rootkit*
3
Having witnessed teenage boys moaning into a microphone for an entire 25-minute match because my friend (a woman) spoke twice, I would say that it has nothing to do with growing thick skin.
My friend has thick skin. They heard it, muted everyone, calmly asked me to be the middleman for important callouts, and we played out the match. That is just normal there, unfortunately.
3
The article has literally zero info about what they are actually going to do. It's just people going "this is bad and these people are the worst, we do not want them here".
Ok? So what are you gonna do about it?
All it does is mention that "tech that can be a game-changer sometimes takes a long time" and I'm guessing that's referring to Riot's plans to use AI to mass-surveill all voice chats to detect harassment.
35I will say their report software is very good and usually gets results within half an hour.
12
I've played in both valorant and csgo communities and after a year or so of valorant I came back to csgo. Maybe in some regions of the world or in lower ranks things may be worse but on csgo I felt pretty welcome everywhere. Sure we would talk shit and curse and maybe some random asshole griefer would ruin the game but I never liked valorant too much. I guess you kinda have to experience it to understand.
Edit: also, valorant is basically rootkit and I'm not running that on my computer, and couldn't if I wanted to (I use arch btw)
25It's so interesting that there are comments about how people can mute/block people if they get harassed, but nothing about the people doing the actual unhinged harassment. It seems personal responsibility only should be for the victims of harassment...
On the topic itself, I actually know someone who works at Riot that is working on their "player management" tools, and the amount of data they have driving these is fascinating. The datasets they have are global, and aside from Vanguard, apparently there are certain toxicity trends that are so niche (in the Chinese servers, for example), you have to tune for the other server data sets for it (they weren't really clear on how this works).
I really wish I could see what the backend of this tech is like, very few games have 10+ years of player and esports data to train their LLM/AI models.
19Probably an amazing amount of data from people with open mics, little do their families know they are being recorded and saved to riots servers. Just spooky in all honesty. Tbh I see these people just not talking in the game themselves and just moving into discord. You get rid of toxicity but also encourage people to just not bother communicating at all.
1
Yeah, can't have people just growning thicker skins ... they should have to buy them via micro transaction!
16Lots of people in the comments self-reporting their habits in games with voice chat... yikes...
6No one should play Valorant or any Riot game in the first place
5Halo 2 never had a mute function and people survived.
1That's just survivor bias. Gaming spaces are better when harassment is punished.
23Do you really want the standard of life to be a halo 2 lobby? Halo 2 lobbies were full of bigotry of all types. We can and do, do better.
13
People are too sensitive nowadays, but some people also take things too far with their insults
-27Did you even listen to what was said? Insults are one thing but alluding to rape and then saying it's not rape if the rapist enjoys it. Is on a whole different level of depravity.
20I didn't listen to the clip, no
But yeah, that person needs serious help if that's what they said
3Yes but that isn't the only thing they are going to go after.
1In this video, you hear her say she's not going to mute him for the content. She has the tools to solve the problem. But she chose not to use them.
EDIT Also she deleted the full clip and video from her Twitch. Nothing funny going on here.
-17
Can people mute and block other players in the game? If so, just use the tools you have.
-33Can people play a game with out spewing hateful garbage?
36This isn't just about hateful garbage this is starting to just be about being rude, pushy, or even speaking foreign languages. Toxicity covers a whole range of communication.
0
The problem is you know you have to mute them/ block them after they say/ do something bad to you. When you block them it may stop them from doing that to you but it doesn't stop them from doing it to others on the game. Making it a bad experience for others.
Mute/personal blocks do not fix the root problem which is the toxic players being toxic in the game.
26If you're driving down the road and someone throws shit in your face from the sidewalk can you just not roll up the window? If so, just use the tools that you have.
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