VALORANT players criticize Riot’s increased dodge penalties in Patch 6.07

Riot Games has implemented new punishing measures through Patch 6.07 yesterday to reduce the number of queue dodgers in VALORANT, which has been found as the “most common offense” affecting gameplay. Although Riot has the numbers to back it up, the players don’t necessarily agree this will solve the problem. In fact, there are players thinking this change will only bring more problems to VALORANT.

“I’d rather someone dodge my game than troll or go AFK, or just not play as well on a different agent cause they didn’t get their agent,” one Redditor said. “Maybe they want some communication on the comp, maybe their agent for that map is already taken and they aren’t in the correct mindset to play another agent, or they are focusing on a specific agent and don’t want to use that game time not practicing that specific agent,” another Redditor said, expanding on the idea on why someone might dodge games in VALORANT.

Queue dodging is the term used when VALORANT players join a queue and “abruptly” leaves it in their turn to pick an agent. This action cancels the queue for all players and forces everyone to search for a game again, increasing the amount of time before actually jumping into the server and playing a match. In order to reduce this action, Riot has increased the amount of Ranked Rating loss for repeated queue dodgers.

“Ranked queue dodging and normal queue dodging account for 21.72% and 15.34% of all participation incidents respectively, totaling 37.07% of all participation incidents since the beginning of the year,” Riot said. “The high frequency of this incident type is common across players. We believe that this increase in Ranked Rating loss for consecutive queue dodges reflects our firm stance against serial queue dodging in VALORANT and it will impact the queue dodge behavior in the way that benefits players over time.”

Now that Riot has already pushed an update to tackle queue dodging, all that is left is to wait and see if it actually reduces the number of occurrences without bringing more problems to the game, as some players fear. Patch 6.07 have also implemented a one-day Ranked restriction for players who frequently AFK during matches and brought map Bind back ahead of time. You can take a look at all the changes in the Patch 6.07 notes.