I've been playing valorant for about 20 hours so far. mostly a mix of unrated, swiftplay, and spike rush. haven't gotten to ranked mode yet so I can't speak to what that experience is
something I've noticed about it in contrast to most other online fps games is how much more often I hear women on comms, often sounding pretty comfortable and not feeling like they need to keep their guard up. people who speak up are generally pleasant and affable, excusing mistakes despite how impactful they can be on a match. rude players have been an exception instead of the norm
blizzard heavily advertises OW2 as a game for a wide audience, and it's way more forgiving of player errors thanks to a high sustain and an abundance of characters who aren't aim-dependent. but it's just as dominated by aggressive dudes as any other contemporary shooter. a guy wrote a long message calling me a cuck because I said gg at the end of a match
I'm not sure exactly what the difference is. it could be a silver living to the cosmetics being insanely expensive, because getting banned means losing that whole collection. I doubt it's related to the format of the game, because it's mechanically identical to csgo and that thing is flypaper for racists
I've seen at least one player get nuked from orbit by the auto-mod system as soon as they said something nasty, so maybe they're more liberal about punishing bad behavior. I'm leaning towards this one because riot is probably smart enough to not let bad actors cannibalize the casual majority of the playerbase. making that moderation visible is also a way of comforting timid players while putting the fear of god in any potential offenders
it's definitely put me way more at ease than I expected for something like this. if modern games are going to be so heavily oriented towards macro-level matchmaking systems instead of self-selected instances/servers, I would at least hope those same systems could guarantee a more leisurely social experience as an upside