On the recent AMA conducted by the Riot competitive team, there was one specific comment that was not received well by the community: Penalties for character select dodging.

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Now, I would say that I agree with the community that the reasons for character select screen dodging is mostly of the following reasons:

1. Do not want to play with chat-banned players as communication in this game is VERY IMPORTANT.
2. Someone screaming racist/vulgarity in the character selection screen.
3. Poor team composition (4 duelists insta-lock).
4. All the agents the player uses are picked and would rather play with another team than be a deadweight.

I also think that sometimes, people character select dodge trying to game the system like for example not wanting to play a certain map (looking at you Icebox) or trying to "trick" the algorithm as you know, sometimes when you are on a win streak, the matchmaking will try to match you with players who have higher skills than you. On the 2nd point, im not sure how it actually works on "tricking" the algorithm but hey, these are concerns too.

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Most people who character select dodge though do it for the 4 reasons I mentioned above. However, we can't deny that there are people who dodge, for lack of a better word, "malicious" intent. So as a solution that I can think of, VALORANT should implement Honor System and Separate Queues for chat banned people.

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Honor System

So basically, there will be another ranking system where your "honor" is measured. After a game, you can commend teammates that you are not in a party with or in your friend list to avoid abuse. Let's say if you play with someone who was really nice and was not toxic, you can commend him and his honor will be increased. For the decrease of honor system, I think there's already a metric in place (report for disrespectful behaviour/sabotaging team) that Riot can verify before doing deductions. With this system in place, hopefully people with similar honor rank will be teamed-up with one another. If you're toxic, then you'll be teamed-up with toxic people. Maybe try to be a little nicer next time? Im not sure how to properly implement this as of now but this is just an idea and any input on this one will be appreciated.

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Separate queues for chat-banned people

On the 2nd suggestion, Riot said before that using comms isn't mandatory but honestly, not using comms in a ranked game is just putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. I use comms when I play ranked. It's just a disservice to my teammates if I don't do callouts. You could argue that you could type anyway but VALORANT is a game of seconds (even micro seconds) and typing+reading takes more time than speaking+listening.

It has been suggested by a lot of people that chat-banned people shouldn't be able to queue rank and I agree with them. However, Riot also needs to balance it as hey, chat-banned people buy gun skins too and locking them out of rank might make them lose potential revenues. My suggestion is that if you're chat banned, you can play rank BUT you can only be queued with other chat-banned people. This change will not lock them out of ranked and it will also filter out people who don't use comms in the normal queue.

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TLDR: Implement honor system so that you can somewhat be matched with people with same behaviour as you. Chat banned people can still play rank but only with other chat banned people hence will make the experience for ranked mode normal players more fun.