Riot Games will begin combating toxicity in Valorant by recording voice chats and evaluating them for behaviors that violate its policies, the company said. The news of the new practices came from Riot’s updated Privacy Notice as it pertains to Valorant as well as the rest of the Riot Games portfolio. Riot said, however, that Valorant will be the only game that’ll have its voice chat recorded at this time.
Those who play Valorant have likely hear in-game voice comms turn nasty at one point or another before breaking down into offensive behavior, or if not, there’s a good chance you’ve seen one of the many clips posted on social media to see it happening. While text chat was already moderated, voice chat was a different situation.
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Riot explained how the voice moderation would work in its blog post about the updated privacy policies.
“The update to our privacy notice allows us to record and potentially evaluate voice data when using Riot-owned voice comms channels,” Riot said. “When a player submits a report for disruptive or offensive behavior in voice comms, the relevant audio data will be stored in your account’s registered region and evaluated to see if our behavior agreement was violated. If a violation is detected, we’ll take action.”
So, while your callouts and conversations shared over voice chat will be recorded, Riot won’t actively be listening to them unless they have a reason to that’s spurred on by someone reporting in-game behavior. Once it’s been determined a violation occurred, the data will be made available to the player who violated Riot’s policies to show what the infringing moment was. After that, the data will be deleted and would similarly be deleted if there were no violations or if reports don’t get issued within a timely manner.
Though Riot’s policies encompass all of its games at once, the company said Valorant is the only game that’ll have its voice chat moderated. That means Riot’s other games won’t record voice chat, and Riot said it has no plans to record chat nor expand chatting capabilities in other games at this time.
The Valorant team described disruptive voice chats as “a huge pain point” for many players. The system isn’t live yet, but Riot said it’s currently in development. If you don’t want your voice chats recorded, Riot recommended turning off your voice chat feature to prevent that from happening.
