VALORANT devs add penalties for going AFK, dodging ranked games, and being toxic in chat in Patch 2.05

With VALORANT Patch 2.05 rolling out, frequent AFKers, queue dodgers, and toxic chat spammers will face new consequences.

In a Feb. 15 dev diary post, the VALORANT devs outlined the ideas they had for penalties for repeat offenders of this type. Starting with the new patch, though, those ideas have been realized and implemented into games.

Players who dodge queues in a competitive match are now at risk of receiving a small penalty to their rank rating. This small penalty of three rank rating points is designed to be of most annoyance to repeat offenders. If a player has to dodge a queue once or twice because of toxic teammates or another unforeseen reason, the impact should stay relatively small.

Queue dodgers aren’t the only ones subject to new penalties, however. “Improved AFK detection” has been implemented and this includes new penalties for frequent AFK offenses. These penalties scale up from warning and queue restrictions up to XP denial, competitive queue bans, and overall game bans.

These same penalties will also be distributed for “chat-based offenses.” Ideally, harsher penalties should dissuade players from being toxic in text and voice chat, or at the very least, remove the players who do so repeatedly. In the patch notes, Riot included a reminder that “zero tolerance offenses will result in game bans automatically.”

While this won’t instantly remove all the repeat offenders, players should see less of them when queueing up in the future.

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