Riot Games, the developer of the free first-person shooter (FPS) game Valorant, will begin monitoring players ’voice communications on July 13 (via PCGamer). The gaming company says it wants to help train the language models it will eventually use when evaluating player reports on all of its games.
Riot initially announced this change in April 2021 after updating its privacy policy. The new terms give Riot permission to “record and potentially evaluate voice data when using Riot’s proprietary voice communications channels” for the purpose of combating hate speech and harassment through voice chat. Riot says he will analyze the recordings when a player denounces someone for abusive or offensive comments. In turn, this should help the company determine if the reported player has breached its policies and take action accordingly.
The only way to turn off this system is to turn off voice chat completely
Riot will not yet begin evaluating player reports based on these recordings; is using the information it collects to help build the beta version of the system that is expected to be released later this year. For now, Riot will only evaluate the conversations of English-speaking Valorant players in North America. The only way to disable this system is to completely disable voice chat or use another communication tool, such as Discord.
“We know that before we can think about extending this tool, we need to be sure that it is effective, and if errors occur, we have systems in place to make sure we can correct the false positives (or negatives for the case).” , Riot points out in his ad.
When this system is deployed, Riot says it will not “actively monitor live gaming communications” and will only “potentially listen to and review voice recordings” if you are reported for disruptive behavior. He also adds that he will delete this information after resolving the situation, in the same way he does with reports made to his text-based chat systems. However, you are required to raise the concerns of some players about privacy, such as the always-running Vanguard anti-cheating system that monitors your activity both inside and outside of Valorant.
The planned reporting system is not the only way Valorant is trying to crack down on toxic players. Earlier this year, Riot began allowing Valorant players to add specific words or phrases to a “muted word list” that was supposed to help block abusive content in the chat.