Thank you for the post but I do have a few issues with it that I want to address here. First of all, your suggestion of banning people who get a lot of kills on obviously-fresh accounts would not be fair to some players, especially the hardcore fps fanbase which have a lot of experience and practice playing other similar fps games, such as CS, so obviously they would have good aim, crosshair placement, situational-awareness, stuff like that, without even playing Valorant before, since these skills would transfer over. Also, people's performances and and stats and kills and stuff naturally can vary widely from game to game, so it is hard making an anti-cheat that bans only those types of people who purposefully tries to derank so they can smurf, without flagging a bunch of other false-positives of people who just happens to be popping off one day (like that one time I got 7 kills when I usually could only get 2-4 per game) and a lot of the player frustration and bad publicity would ensue from that. Riot knows that, so they are trying hard to strike a balance when trying to detect which players are actually smurfing and ban them. The afk thing is easier to detect and ban (they do do that, I got a warning just because my game crashed that one time during a match), but this is a difficult and delicate situation to deal with when you don't know the player's intentions. You would not want to ban a first-time player just because they already have the skills for it, right? Also, please don't ask them to make the level requirement to play ranked any higher, or make the process even longer than it already is, because i am only level 10 and it is taking me literally forever for me to even get to level 20 to play comp (I have been playing for about 3 months now, and only on the weekends), and my friends have kicked me out and excluded me 2 times from their party, just because I'm not high enough level to play comp with them, and it hurts when that happens, and I don;t want to prolong my pain and frustration. Also having such a high (and artificial) barrier of entry for all new players would discourage a lot of new players (just like me) from ever really picking up the game, and these types of policies would punish a bunch of innocent players for a problem that only a only a malicious minority of players are causing. Sure, such a policy change would not really affect, or even positively affect the gameplay experiences of the players who are already well-established in the scene in the short term, but this would heavily discourage new players from picking up the game and sticking with it, and this, in time would cause the game to slowly die out with time, as the established playerbase grow older and slowly quit the game, without enough influx of new players to replace them. Unless, of course this is your goal, and you want Valorant to slowly die out and fizzle away. When you said there should never be a ranked game that is 13-0, I think that is a bit extreme because it sounds like you want, or expect the game itself (to some extent) to be able to predict and control the outcome of the match, which is supposed to come directly as the result of a combination and interactions between all of the players' actions and nothing else. If the devs force the game to not end in a certain way (such as a 0-13 or 13-0), then is the game still really fair, if the end result isn't purely the result of players' inputs? But i d agree what you said about hardware banning, though it should only be used as a last resort, and the stuff you said about Valoant taking less actions against streamers smurfing in their game, because the big streamers playing is basically free, and very-effective advertisement for their game to the youth, so they pull more people in, and get them to spend more money on skins and stuff. That is their business model, and I can definitely see the hypocrisy here, because Valorant was supposed to be an e-sport first, a game second, so they treat their celebrities like royalty (if they can prove themselves to stay there, that is.)
TLDR: Some of the changes you proposed in this post will not work as well as you thought they would, because the world isn't black-and-white, and people (just like in real life), cannot be easily and cleanly divided between being good or being bad, and this applies to Valorant too. A lot of changes that you proposed would adversely affect the people who didn't cause the problem in the first place, disproportionately targeting especially new players, and even if these changes don't affect you personally right now, if it was implemented, it would likely cause a measurable drop in new players over time, causing this game to slowly die out, which would affect you eventually. Just to be clear, I don't mean to offend or attack you (and I hope you don't take my criticism as such.) I just want to have an interesting conversation on the ways Riot can (hypothetically) make Valorant a more-enjoyable experience for all of us, both the noobs and the pros. This has been an interesting read, thank you for posting and sharing your thoughts.
