Following an announcement earlier this month about a new penalty structure for AFK offenses, the VALORANT developers have responded to specific feedback about queue dodging.
In their initial post on Feb. 15, the devs outlined a list of potential punishments for repeat offenders, including XP denial, rank deductions for in-game AFKing, and smaller deductions for pre-game dodges during agent select or queue. And today, the devs talked more about queue dodging in particular in a new blog post.
The team reiterated that the punishments are only targeting repeat offenders, and will have “minimal impact” on occasional dodgers. The rank rating reduction is only three points, ensuring there will only be a serious impact for repeat offenders. The devs acknowledged that queue dodging is needed sometimes, like to avoid toxic teammates, so they’ve “kept it quick to earn back your rank rating, while not impacting your MMR with these penalties.”
The new AFK penalties are expected to ship with Patch 2.04.
In the same post, the VALORANT developers responded to feedback about knives. The knife has gotten more attention with the new Escalation game mode since most games end with a knife round.
The developers admitted that the knife is “a bit of a meme” right now, only meant as a last resort or to humiliate someone. They’d like to improve on the “static, unintuitive” hitbox that’s only active for a brief period of time, but they said other weapon balance issues take priority.
The devs revealed that they were actually going to pass on the knife altogether for Escalation but had to include it due to time constraints since they were missing a proper replacement. So they shipped the “BIG KNIFE” mode, as they call it, but hope to come back and revisit the knife as a whole.
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