How Kicking Works in Vermintide 2
If you've been in enough public games, you've probably wondered whether someone can actually get removed for shooting their own team. The short answer is yes, but the system isn't as straightforward as you'd expect. Fatshark built teamkicking into Vermintide 2 with a combination of soft anti-teamkill mechanics and a manual removal system that only the host can trigger. The kick system in Vermintide 2 works through the Match Options menu. Once you open it, there's a "Kick Player" option next to each person in your lobby. The catch is that only the host has access to this. If you're not the host and someone is actively teamkilling you, you're stuck hoping they leave on their own or that the group decides to make you host so you can fix it yourself. I've been in games where a guy would swing his hammer and miss every single Chaostalker, hitting our warrior instead, and by the time someone actually kicked him, we'd already lost two members of the squad to poor positioning. There's also an automatic penalty layer. The game tracks how much damage you deal to allies, and if it crosses a certain threshold, you get flagged. Repeated violations result in a temporary matchmaking suspension—usually around five to ten minutes—and a mute during that window. I remember one run where a newly connected player with a controller didn't seem to realize the teammate damage was still active, and he ended up locked out of matchmaking for about eight minutes after accidentally nailing his mage three times in a single mission. The system didn't distinguish between intentional and accidental; it just counted the damage.
What most people don't realize is that teamkill damage scales down significantly. You're dealing roughly half damage to allies compared to enemies, and it drops even further once you start missing your attacks entirely. This means a genuinely bad player who's swinging wildly isn't going to rack up teamkill points nearly as fast as someone deliberately focusing fire on their squad. In practice, I've seen people accused of teamkilling who were actually struggling with aim assist and missed more shots than they landed. The anti-teamkill penalty caught them anyway because the game doesn't care about intent—it only tracks the numbers. The real problem comes with voice chat muting. When the penalty kicks in, your party chat gets silenced, which means the actual teamkicker in your lobby can no longer hear you asking them to stop or coordinate differently. I found that the best workaround was to just use the in-game emote wheel to signal "follow me" or "stay back" repeatedly while waiting for the match to end, then leaving the session immediately so the next group wouldn't have the same person. It's not elegant, but it's faster than trying to reason through a muted voice channel with someone who clearly doesn't understand the controls. One more thing worth noting: the kick system doesn't carry over between matches. If someone gets kicked in one mission, they can join a fresh game immediately unless they've accumulated enough auto-penalties to trigger a matchmaking ban. So kicking is really just a quick pressure release valve, not a lasting consequence. The actual enforcement comes from the automated damage tracking, and that's what tends to irritate people more than the manual kick itself.
