VALORANT and a lot of other competitive online games are tons of fun, but they’re also plagued by toxic players who are more concerned with their teammates’ failures than focusing on their own performance. These are their stories.
A player asked a “genuine question to those who trash talk their teammates in ranked” in a Reddit thread from July 6: why? And several of those toxic specimens gave honest answers that won’t give you much hope for the better.
One player explained they didn’t intend to trash talk teammates but simply asked “why” they did such bad plays repeatedly, and then got mad because they would get offended.
“I am competitive at heart, and I can keep it in check. What really irritates me are stupid plays and constant bad choices,” they wrote. “I don’t trash talk my teammates unless they get upset that I called them out on their poor plays by asking why when they make the same stupid choices.”
Obviously, their answer was highly debated in the answers. Players explained that it was more productive to focus on one’s play rather than teammates’ mistakes.
Some other players said they would get emotional and blame teammates for their mistakes, just not to their faces. Competitive games can get intense, as the point is to play with something at stake, but n one player can be in complete control of the outcome due to VALORANT being a team-based game.
“You can keep it to yourself. I trash talk a lot but I only do it in party/Discord or to myself, then I tell them nt,” read one of the top-voted comments.
Related: Someone is running VALORANT at 1000 FPS thanks to AMD and a custom PC
All in all, you can get emotional in a ranked game and trash talk—just not with your microphone on. Maybe it was the solution all along. That won’t help your performance in the game, though.
