Valorant players face harsher penalties for AFKs and dodging

Valorant’s harsher stance on AFKs and queue dodging is already showing results, with Riot reporting a 20% drop in disruptive behavior in Competitive matches since penalties were ramped up in recent patches.

AFKs have long been one of Valorant’s most frustrating issues. Losing a single teammate instantly turns a 5v5 into a 4v5, ruining fairness and dragging down the experience for everyone else in the lobby.

Riot previously aimed for fairness by sparing players with unstable connections and using behavior ratings so one-off mistakes weren’t punished too severely. But these softer measures had a gap. Small groups of players who repeatedly AFK’d or dodged queues were slipping through the cracks.

Riot cuts AFKs by 20 percent after harsher penalties

That’s why in patches 11.00 and 11.05, released in June and September 2025, Riot escalated its approach with firmer punishments. The updated system scales penalties much faster for frequent offenders instead of waiting for very large infractions to build up.

Since those changes went live, Riot says the results have been clear. Competitive matches saw AFKs and similar behaviors drop by roughly 20%, while Swiftplay recorded about a 6% decrease.

Riot Games

Before, Riot’s behavior systems were letting small but frequent offenders slip through. Valorant’s developers noticed that although these players made up less than 1% of active users, they accounted for a disproportionately large share of all AFKs.

Some players cheer the changes, others complain loudly. “Now we can’t dodge when we have trolls, cheaters or win traders in the lobby? For every win we get +10 and lose -30 RR”, one user wrote. Another vowed, “people w bad wifi gonna be hard stuck silver.”

And one didn’t hold back, “ur AFK penalty system is *ss I get the same RR loss for losing with an AFK round 3 that the AFKer is getting just fix that sh*t.”

Riot said it will keep monitoring the system to make sure penalties stay fair and effective. They also plan more behavior rating updates and are exploring tighter controls in voice and text chat.