Riot has released a deep dive on Valorant’s away from keyboard (AKF) detection system and how they plan to improve it.
Valorant is a competitive 5v5 first-person shooter and having one player step away can ruin the balance of a match. To help combat this Riot has introduced an AFK detection system that has been in place since March. However, the hard part is to avoid false positives. “It would be really bad if someone was holding an angle for a while staying completely still and we flagged them as AFK” Riot said.
“The good news from our work so far is that the various detections and interventions that we set in place to detect and penalize/deter AFKs seems to have made a meaningful impact on the frequency with which AFKs happen in your games.” This system also includes people who stay active to avoid detection but choose not to participate in the match. Riot did not share how this side of the system works, to avoid exploitation.
“Since we first started work on AFKs, we broadened the different behaviours that qualify as an AFK in our system. As players get more… ‘creative’ with how they AFK in-game, so will our detection. The added bonus here is that a lot of the more clever AFK techniques tend to overlap with other unwanted behaviours in our game, such as intentionally feeding, griefing, or automated bot account farming.”
Riot also said that they will try to keep the Valorant community informed on its progress with the system. “Sharing both the process and results of our work to improve Valorant’s community is an outlook to which we are committed. It’s something that you’ve told us you want. It’s one of the reasons we wanted to write these articles in the first place.”
In other news, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is getting crossplay early next year and voice acting could be on the way too.
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