Toxicity and game-ruining behavior are issues that Riot Games has been working to address throughout Valorant’s lifespan, and that continues with a change to friendly fire penalties.
The developer has already made changes to monitor voice communications, and accurately detect smurfs. Now it’s looking to address players using Valorant’s friendly fire to negatively impact games. According to one of Valorant’s foremost data miners, these changes are ready to go and will arrive to live servers next patch.
Allies cannot damage each other with any of the guns, or most projectile weapons, in Valorant. Instead, some damaging abilities that are meant to be used for zone control can damage both allies and enemies. Examples of this are Killjoy and Raze’s grenades, Phoenix’s Hot Hands, Brimstone’s Molotov, and more. Some players used these as a way to deal damage to, or kill, teammates in order to ruin their experience.
Messages that have been data-mined from the upcoming patch seem to suggest that Riot is taking a step to implement measures against intentional trolling using abilities in Valorant.
The message that most clearly points to this says “Looks like your ability usage adversely impacted your allies in a recent game.” With some sort of post-lobby way to punish players for ruining their teammates’ experiences, Valorant players would likely feel better about enduring that sort of negative behavior.
At the moment there are no friendly fire penalties in Valorant, but that is set to change.
The penalties haven’t yet been revealed, but it’s likely to be a lockout from queuing back up or perhaps a suspension or ban altogether depending on the severity. Whatever the punishments’ specifics end up being, they’re practically guaranteed to keep offending parties out of other players’ games for long enough that they might reflect on their behavior. Maybe.
Hopefully the detecting mechanisms for friendly fire in Valorant aren’t too strict, or else a few bad grenades could land you in hot water.
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