It hasn’t even been a month since the Valorant closed beta became available but toxic sexist harassment is already affecting female players. One recent incident happened to League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics UX designer Riot Greenily who played solo queue. Fortunately, Riot is aware of sexist harassment in the game and is already working on a solution.
Greenily also said that such sexist harassment is a common occurrence in solo queue voice comms and other female players responded with stories of similar experiences. Valorant executive producer Anna Donlon also responded and revealed that such toxicity is one of the reasons why she doesn’t play solo queue. Donlon called the harasser’s actions “gross” and “creepy as hell” then confirmed that they are already looking into long term solutions to address sexism in the game.
Donlon’s response serves as a confirmation of the information game director Joe Ziegler revealed in an interview when asked about preparations the team did to address potential toxicity ahead of Valorant’s closed beta launch. Zeigler mentioned in the interview that the team has already included features inside the game to address toxicity based on their learning from LoL. “So we’ll be using technology from the shared Riot concepts, and having specific salves around certain features that we have inside of our game […] we’ve done a lot of research to actually make sure and do that work,” Zeigler said.
