verbal_abuse/spam FAQ

Why have I been banned for verbal_abuse or spam?

These bans are put in place by our new automatic detection systems, which we refer to as Minerva

Minerva uses an extensively trained machine learning model to identify abusive language and toxic behaviour in-game.

How do these bans work?

The system will give you a warning notification if abusive language or spam is detected in one of your games. If this behaviour continues, you will be given a 24-hour cooldown. Any further incidents will trigger a cooldown for an additional 24 hours.

Why have I been banned for spam?

You will be given a cooldown for spam if, quite simply, you have been spamming/flooding the in-game chat repeatedly. To avoid this, simply keep the chat exclusively for productive in-game chat and avoid spamming the chat with the same messages over and over. 

Will other players see these bans on my account?

These bans will show publicly on your profile for their duration.

Once the ban has ended it will no longer be visible on your account.

Am I going to be falsely banned as a machine is judging my behaviour?

Minerva uses a highly trained machine learning model to identify and judge player sentiment during a match. 

Minerva can analyse context and phrasing to gauge the overall sentiment and conduct of a player during a match, and if deemed inappropriate, will place the cooldown on that player.

Please keep in mind that Minerva will only trigger a cooldown once extremely inappropriate conduct has been identified, the threshold to trigger a cooldown is currently quite high.

This has been extensively tested on FACEIT behind the scenes and false positives have proven to be infrequent. Our team is also constantly checking and improving the model to further minimise such cases.