While competitive gaming can offer some exciting experiences and even give the best players careers in eSports, there are some issues that players can face when wanting to rank up in games like CS:GO, League of Legends, and Valorant. Often these issues stem from players interacting with each other and can usually be summed up with the term "toxic behavior." Verbally harassing and trolling other players through voice chat is a problem that many gamers face and a few games have tried to fix. Back 4 Blood recorded what players said in its voice chat, for example.
Now, Riot Games, the developer behind League of Legends and Valorant, is looking to follow suit. Riot has stated in a brief update posted to the Valorant website that starting July 13 in North America, English voice chat will be recorded. This has caused some concern from players who believe this acts as an invasion of their privacy in Valorant and could lead to some unfair bans from the game.
Riot has since stated that this will be a background launch of a voice evaluation tool that it plans to launch in beta this year. The technology will use recordings of what players say in voice chat in order to determine which users are breaking behavioral policies. Essentially, this tool seeks to detect overly toxic users, working in a similar way to a recent Sony patent that sought to root out toxicity by detecting disruptive play.
Currently, Riot Games' test will only listen to the voice chat of English-speaking users. And to put their minds at ease, the developer has also stated that even if a player is found to be disruptive, it will not automatically ban them. There are "systems in place" to correct any falsely positive or negative results occurring from the detection system. Riot is clearly ramping up its stance against toxic behavior, something that many of its fans have been wanting for some time. Before changing Valorant's voice chat feature, the company previously removed the all-chat function in League of Legends to stop players from other teams from being toxic towards each other.
Even with this change being a major one to Riot's reporting of toxic behavior, the developer introduced the concept of voice chat recording Valorant some time ago. In April 2021, Riot Games updated its terms of service so that it could "record and evaluate" voices in its games, beginning with the competitive FPS. In that iteration, the company would only review recordings when an incident was reported. Now, fans are seeing a more updated version, that will presumably be much better at tracking and identifying any toxicity.
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