Valve to auto-mute CS:GO players who abuse voice chat

If you’re a CS:GO player, there’s a good chance you’ve been bothered by another player who’s toxic or just annoying in your casual matchmaking game every once in a while.

For years, the solution has been to mute those players through the scoreboard and reporting them for voice abuse. But yesterday, Valve introduced a new system that will auto-mute players who abuse the voice button.

When the system is fully functioning, players will receive a warning if they receive significantly more voice abuse reports than the average competitor.

“If they ignore that feedback and continue to receive abuse reports, they’ll receive a penalty,” Valve said. “They will be muted by all other players by default. This ‘default mute’ state will remain until the player earns enough XP to remove the penalty, but other players can choose to manually unmute the user (as they would any other muted player).”

For this system to work, players will have to get in the habit of reporting others who abuse voice comms. But Valve is more likely to consider reports made by more active players and/or players who report less frequently to prevent anyone from trying to abuse the new system. “Accounts that generate no XP and/or spam reports will have little to no impact,” Valve said.

All reports made in CS:GO are anonymous, so you can even report a friend if you want them to behave better without telling them that directly.