Riot Games has been very vocal on their commitment towards making VALORANT a much less toxic environment for players.
In order to achieve a more friendly environment for players Riot Games implemented some automated system that would detect toxic player behavior and automatically ban them from in-game chat for at least 72 hours.
However, as it turns out, the system is automated and there are very few manual interventions, players can abuse this reporting system to their advantage to potentially “sabotage” a game and not getting any real punishment in return.
Furthermore, players can actually get a 72-hour chat ban without even using any form of communication including text chat, voice chat, the ping system, the communication wheel, or even requesting weapons, etc.
VALORANT’s Report System flaws:
A player did a social experiment to expose the vulnerabilities in Riot’s automated reporting system in VALORANT. Basically, u/PoolNissan created a new Riot and VALORANT account to test if a player can actually get a chat ban without even using any form of communication.
After completing the first 20 unrated matches, this player moved into ranked games where he/she would only use the default pistols or knife. On top of that, he/she would also use an agent with damaging abilities to literally sabotage the game.
Even though he/she didn’t use any form of communication, he/she later got a chat ban for at least 72 hours after being reported by his/her teammates for intentionally ruining their experience.
However, the main problem, in this case, is that VALORANT’s automated reporting system could be easily abused by random toxic players. The truly worrying part is that players can get away with only a chat ban for 72 hours even if they intentionally sabotage a game.
The main purpose of this experiment was to find out if you can get away with sabotaging a game in VALORANT without using any form of communication. And as it turns out, you can’t actually get banned for sabotaging a game. In this case, players are only going to get a chat ban. Not an actual ban from the game entirely.
Even though he/she actually wanted to get a ban from the game for sabotaging games, he/she only got a chat ban. A manual review would have easily caught the issue. Since this is an automated system, there is a chance that toxic players can abuse the system and get away with it. Riot needs to do more manual reviews in those cases to protect players from random inting.
