Valorant, Riot Games’ quickfire, free-to-play FPS, has often struggled to engender good behaviour and friendly competition between its fans. But now, a Reddit thread suggests a potentially perfect new honour system — things could be looking up.
User u/rookcookie’s post gained some traction this past week, as the bottom-fragging Brim player suggested an honour system to reward teammates for good behavior. Despite their poor in game performance, their teammates remained cheerful and encouraging; positive attitudes that deserve commendation.
The interesting part of this idea is that it isn’t an entirely new one. Positive feedback options aren’t new to the online FPS scene, or even to Riot Games. League of Legends implemented an honour system back in 2012. Along with being able to report toxic players, LoL players can honour their teammates for staying cool, shotcalling, or being friendly and in earlier implementations, even honor opponents.
CS:GO, which has one of the largest online FPS scenes, also has an honour system in place. During the post-match lobby, players can choose to honour teammates for their attitude, game knowledge, and skill.
Overwatch takes the honour system a step further. Players can still honour each other for categories like sportsmanship, shotcalling, and being a team player; however, the Overwatch system calculates these endorsements into an endorsement level that is shown on a player’s account. Players with a high endorsement level earn additional XP and are rewarded regularly with free loot boxes.
The crux of the conversation remains Riot’s incentive, or lack thereof, tied to the honor system. LoL players had complained about the game’s honour system for years. Riot eventualy updated the honour system to include levels and rewards, similar to Overwatch. A higher honour level now rewards LoL players with key fragments, essence, champion shards, emotes, and skins. And yet, the League of Legends community is still viewed as the most toxic online gaming community.
With a focus on making Valorant’s community better, like tackling the smurf problem with NA testing, Riot should implement some kind of honour system. There has been no news from any of Valorant’s or Riot Games’ official channels regarding an honour system coming to the game, but you have to imagine it will be on the cards in a future update. Only time will tell if it is implemented and how effective it is at curbing toxicity.