Riot Games, the developer behind Valorant, will start monitoring players’ voice communications on July 13th. The company says it’s to help train the language models that it will eventually use when evaluating player reports across all its games. So it is to deal with bad behavior and abuse.
Riot announced this in April 2021 after making an update to its privacy policy. The new terms allow Riot to “record and potentially evaluate voice data when using Riot-owned voice comms channels” to combat hate speech and harassment over voice chat. Riot will look at recordings when a player reports someone for abusive or offensive comments. The idea is that this will help determine whether the reported player violated its policies and then Riot can take action or not.
Riot isn’t going to start assessing player reports based on these recordings yet, but it is using the information it collects to help build the beta of the system that should roll out later in the year. Right now, Riot will only evaluate the conversations of English-speaking players in North America. You can opt out, but you have to disable voice chat completely or use another communication tool, like Discord for instance.
Riot says that it won’t “actively monitor your live game comms” and will only “potentially listen to and review voice logs” if you’re reported for disruptive behavior. And it will delete the information after it resolves the situation. Naturally, it raises some players’ concerns about privacy, much like the always-on Vanguard anti-cheat system of Valorant. It will be interesting to see how this works in action.
Earlier in the year, Riot started letting Valorant players add specific words or phrases to a “muted words list” that should help block out abusive content in chat, so they are putting a lot of effort into combating bad behavior.
Source The Verge
Image Credit Riot