Riot Games, the developer behind the free first-person shooter (FPS) Valorant† will start monitoring players’ voice communication on July 13 (via PCGamer† The game company says it should help train the language models it will eventually use when evaluating player reports for all of its games.
Riot initially announced this change in April 2021 following an update to its privacy policy† The new terms allow Riot to “record and potentially evaluate voice data when using voice communications channels owned by Riot” with the aim of combating hate speech and voice chat harassment. Riot says it will analyze withdrawals when a player reports someone for abusive or abusive comments. This, in turn, should help the company determine if the reported player has violated its policy and take action accordingly.
Riot isn’t going to start reviewing player reports based on these recordings just yet – it’s using the information it collects to help build the beta of the system it expects to roll out later this year. For now, Riot only evaluates conversations from Anglophone Valorant players in North America. The only way to opt out of this system is to disable voice chat completely or use another means of communication such as Discord.
“We know that before we can even think about expanding this tool, we need to make sure it’s effective, and if errors do occur, we have systems in place to make sure we can eliminate any false positives (or negatives). correct.” Riot notes in his announcement.
When this system is actually rolled out, Riot says it will “not actively monitor your live game comms” and only “may be listening to and viewing voice logs” if you’re reported for disruptive behavior. It also adds that it will delete this information after it resolves the situation, just as it does for reports created through its text-based chat systems. Even still, it will no doubt raise some players’ privacy concerns, as will the always-on Vanguard anti-cheat system that monitors your activity both in and Outside brave.
The planned reporting system is not the only way Valorant tries to deal with toxic players. Earlier this year, Riot started renting out Valorant players add specific words or phrases to a “muted word list” that should help block offending content in chat.