Riot Games warn about punishments for AFK players

We were informed yesterday that Riot banned almost 9000 cheaters from VALORANT, but it looks like they are not done yet. VALORANT’s Twitter shared information that they will start to punish people who leave the game or are just simply AFK for a few rounds. In a team-based match such as VALORANT one missing player will have a big impact on the performance of the team hence why Riot Games are giving such actions more importance.

One of the punishments for players who are AFK from now on is a longer queue time restrictions, but Riot Games already informed that this is something they will keep monitoring. Maybe the developers will transfer a system from League of Legends called “Leave Buster” that measures how often you leave games and then based on the total number of games you played, this results in a warning, time period ban, and finally escalates to a permanent ban. Riot also asks players to “commit to the games you queue up for”.

We all had AFKs in our team or enemy team. Do you think this will be enough to decrease the number of players that leave games? Will Riot be able to know if someone quit a game intentionally (what’s known as dashboarding) or because of an external factor? If someone quits his game by just closing the game from his Task Manager will it be different if the computer crashes for example? There are many questions that need to be answered, and hopefully, we will get them soon!