A few weeks after several clips from Appreciation Players harassing women in in-game chat have gone viral on X (formerly Twitter) and other social media sites. Riot Games has announced plans to crack down on the offenders. In a seven-minute video posted on X, Appreciation Lead Anna Donlon spoke about the team’s responsibility to protect players, the systems currently in place, and the future steps the studio will take to hopefully minimize abuse.
Insults via voice chat in the game are not only a Appreciation Problem, it is still something Appreciation Gamers – often women and queer people in particular – have only just begun to experience. I wrote about how companies aren’t doing enough to combat toxic voice chat almost a year agoand was again reminded in April of how little had been done when a A viral video apparently showed several men Appreciation
Donlon acknowledges that despite Riot’s valiant efforts, current systems “can’t catch everything” and that “they require constant attention, fine-tuning, and improvement,” which often “has to be done laboriously manually or depends on players reporting things.”
“Ultimately, there are people who want to take out their insecurities, their bad day, or their hatred on strangers through their computer screen,” Donlon said. “All too often, it takes someone exhibiting the worst behavior, something outrageous, something painful, something threatening, for us to better understand where the gaps are in our systems and processes.” She said that’s exactly what Riot Games is experiencing right now, alluding to the aforementioned viral videos and mountains of abuse other players have highlighted in their responses.
But Donlon didn’t mince words when talking about the type of men who enjoy harassing women in gaming voice chat or Twitter threads, and the reply types who offer unsolicited, hypocritical advice for those who want to avoid it. “When you tell someone to just mute communication to avoid harassment, you’re basically putting the person being harassed in a position where they don’t communicate and have to compromise on how they play to accommodate you.”
“We believe that a person should not be able to ‘grow a thicker skin’ or whatever unhelpful suggestions are made just to avoid threats of violence or literal hate speech,” she continued. “There is no place for the most egregious behavior in our community and we will not compromise on that point. If you really need to make nasty statements under the guise of normal shit talk to enjoy gaming, then please play something else. We won’t miss you.”
After this refreshingly factual speech, Donlon then outlines how Riot Games will proceed Appreciation Voice communications in the future and how the team will update its systems to better address harassment. These include:
- Update existing policies within the next 30 days with a focus on stricter and faster penalties for serious conduct (hate speech, serious sexual content, threats of violence).
- New measures and penalties, including temporary and permanent bans, up to hardware bans for the “worst offenders”
- “Increasing” the number of teams that manually review reports
- Expanding the rollout of Riot’s voice rating system to different regions
- One-time review of the top suspects under the current law [a roughly two-month competitive timeframe in Valorant] and impose appropriate penalties
Donlon is “hopeful” that these steps will help players feel more confident while playing Appreciationbut she also referenced plans for a more “proactive” approach that the team will outline at a later date. She noted that hardware bans are an extreme form of punishment (one that some male players have, unsurprisingly, mocked), but said Riot Games will manually review these cases and hand them out when there is “clear evidence” against someone.
As someone who has experienced and reported on violent, hateful in-game voice chat, it’s good to see one of the biggest studios in the industry taking the issue seriously. Is it because a woman is running the game? Who knows…