In Valorant female players have been complaining about harassment in voice chat for being women for a while now. Recently, a LoL developer also fell victim to it and aired her frustrations on Twitter. This led to developers from Valorant stepping in and working on measures against such behavior.
What happened? The UX designer Tea “Greenily” C. from Riot Games primarily works on League of Legends, but enjoys a few rounds of Valorant. At least she enjoyed the rounds in the shooter until she said something in voice chat and shortly after, a male teammate felt compelled to hit on her.
The guy wouldn’t let up, repeatedly calling Greenily “Babe” and treating her as if she were his noob girlfriend that he had to carry.
When the developer asked him if he was 16 years old, he first confirmed it. When she then said “Then I’m at least 10 years too old for you!”, he got caught up in embarrassing contradictions: “I’m actually 23. Okay, I’m 17, but I will be 18 soon!”
Later, he became aggressive, telling Greenily to “shut up” and that he didn’t want to carry her anymore.
The constant comments from the player increasingly annoyed Greenily and ruined her concentration, which ultimately led to the defeat in the game.
Toxic guys ruin women’s fun – Riot wants to intervene
That’s the problem with voice chat: In Valorant, you can mute the voice chat, but then you won’t hear anything from your teammates at all. Unlike in League of Legends, where you can at least still communicate with pings on the map, in Valorant it’s a big disadvantage not to hear your team.
Important tactical information is often exchanged in the voice chat, for example, when you are running through the corridors in a panic and searching for the bomb, while the team calls out warnings and advice.
However, since female players are often recognized by their voices as women, they face harassment from male teammates. As in Greenily’s case, lewd and condescending remarks are directed at female players. If the female player stands up against it, the mood often turns, and the woman is aggressively insulted and verbally attacked.
As a result, many female players don’t even dare to say anything in chat anymore. The streamer Fiona M has reportedly already fallen victim to such actions and has already complained about it on Twitter. She wants to be treated “normally” in Valorant.
This is how Riot reacts: The numerous complaints from female players have now been noticed by Riot. Besides Greenily, another employee named Aeneia has also been harassed online. She is an analyst and strategist at Valorant.
Executive Producer of Valorant, Anna Donlon, intervened and stated, “I also can’t play solo because of this.” By this, she means the solo matchmaking, where you play with randomly selected teammates.
However, that is supposed to change, as the producer promised in the same tweet: “We will look for long-term solutions so that you can play Valorant safely, even in solo queue!”
Gross, this is creepy as hell. This is why I can’t solo. I’m so sorry. We’re absolutely looking into long-term solutions for making it safe to play VALORANT – even solo queue!
— Anna Donlon (@RiotSuperCakes) April 24, 2020
What exactly Riot wants to do to curb the toxic atmosphere in voice chat towards women has not been mentioned. Possible ideas could be
- Mutes for individual people
- or a strictly regulated ban system
After all, Valorant is still in closed beta and is likely to undergo some changes before the release.
Wasn’t there something about sexism and Riot before? Indeed, the studio Riot Games has a controversial history regarding sexism and harassment in the workplace. It has reportedly become so bad that there was an exposé by Kotaku about the work atmosphere at Riot.
As a result, a lot has been done at Riot, including hiring a Harvard professor to reform the company.
