As Riot continues to battle the bots, toxic behaviour, and issues plaguing Valorant‘s matchmaking as you climb the Valorant ranks, the studio has issued a new update on player dynamics and the work they have already done. And, within that update, they detail just how bots are being squished given that 27 out of every 1,000 players are showing up AFK to matches.
These bots which show up to bring XP have now begun being funnelled into lobbies with other AFK bots according to Riot. And, as no damage will be done in a lobby full of these bots, no experience is earned.
But, if a player is still playing and intentionally playing bad to grind XP, Riot is also working on systems to catch them out. The current method looks at all the inputs to see if the poor performance was intentional or not. But, a second is in development.
That second method will aim to catch offenders in the middle of matches, rather than after they have concluded. This real-time input detection though won’t be seen for a while as there is a lot of grey area when it comes to bad play and a lot of potential reasons for that bad play.
As such, this system won’t be introduced until the team has “reduced false positives to a small number”, according to Riot.
It is great to see the game moving in the right direction and while fixing the bots is nice to see, the vast majority of the issues come from real players. Therefore, once this new input detection system gets implemented we should see the health of the game and online matches improve dramatically.