🐱 Riot Will Record Valorant Voice Comms To Catch Racists

Riot Will Record Valorant Voice Comms To Catch Racists

Riot announced updates to its privacy policy today that will allow the company to record and evaluate reported player voice communications in its team-based shooter Valorant.

kotaku.com

Riot announced updates to its privacy policy today that will allow the company to record and evaluate reported player voice communications in its team-based shooter Valorant.

“In order for us to take action against players who use voice comms to harass others, use hate speech, or otherwise disrupt your experience, we need to know what those players are saying,” Riot wrote on their website. “Which is why, moving forward we’ll need the ability to analyze voice data.”

Riot explained the way their new policy works, and stressed that the company will not be actively listening to players, but will only record data if a report is filed.

“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,” Riot wrote.

Whether or not a violation is found, Riot says the audio will subsequently be deleted.


In an interview with Tech Crunch, Weszt Hart, head of players dynamics, and Chris Hymes, data protection officer and CISO, said Riot is still working on what tools to use to evaluate audio recordings and that the process will likely be automated. Automating moderation can be tricky, and can possibly lead to uneven enforcement; to combat this, Hart and Hymes said human moderation will also play a role as they work to find the best method.

For now, Valorant will be the only Riot game using the new audio moderation tools. Valorant, a first-person team-based shooter, has a reputation for players who use voice chat to hurl abuse. Online, some players say this atmosphere makes it difficult to play the game, while others say they quit altogether over toxic voice comms.

Online, Valorant players are mixed about the news. Some players are grateful measures are finally being taken to curtail the rampant racist, sexist, and ableist abuse perpetrated in the game’s voice chat, and hope that the new moderation method will be brought to Riot’s other flagship games like League of Legends. Others expressed privacy concerns and worried that the moderation system could be used to unfairly report players for words taken out of context.

Audio moderation isn’t yet live in Valorant. Riot said the Valorant team will announce when data collection will begin.

 

[WonderWino]

They're a Chinese owned corporate entity.

That are legally required to adhere to the laws of the countries they operate in, or they won't be operating in them for long

 

[Thiletonomics]

I wonder if this system is going to have false positives like Apex Legends banning Japanese players for saying "nigero" which translates to "run away" in English.

I also wonder if people will get banned for saying Niger or Nigeria, just because of how close those countries are to the n-word. Some word filters in other games would filter out those two countries if you type it in chat.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

That are legally required to adhere to the laws of the countries they operate in, or they won't be operating in them for long

Riot Games has been owned by Tencent since 2011.

 

[Dr Pepper]

That are legally required to adhere to the laws of the countries they operate in, or they won't be operating in them for long

If I could rate you optimistic, I would.

 

[gaystoner]

Whenever I've tried to play these games anytime i interact with a 'minority' person they love to throw out the word 'faggot' so often. like any enemy they kill is a 'stupid fag' 'suck my nut homo' and things of that nature.

I wonder if Valorant will be decried as racist when it begins to affect minorities using homophobic slurs

 

[Super Sad Smile]

Listening to two 14 year olds arguing over who was the bigger faggot was the only fun part of valorant

 

[CarlKingofDucks]

I dont really know what valorant is but I suppose I could get on and read mein kampf for some people.

 

[Kheapathic]

I remember the 360 days where lots of idiots were getting banned for showing their dicks on video in games like Uno, or just blatant hacking, and vicious name calling. Always had some parent do the "My child has done nothing wrong" to which Customer Support would get back to them with a recording of what their little angel did. Something something, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

 

[Juan's Sombrero]

Never even heard of this game until now.

 

[CatboyCumDump]

Use Discord then.

use mumble

 

[The Last Stand]

Whenever I've tried to play these games anytime i interact with a 'minority' person they love to throw out the word 'faggot' so often. like any enemy they kill is a 'stupid fag' 'suck my nut homo' and things of that nature.

I wonder if Valorant will be decried as racist when it begins to affect minorities using homophobic slurs

If a game's enforcement team would enforce in game voice infractions, it has to be universal with their code of conduct. Context is important as well. As somebody said, some words in other languages can look or sound like racial slurs.

 

[Brahma]

Good luck trying to keep up with the euphemism treadmill.


I can be fucking racist just with the tone of my voice lmao

 

[Sithis]

Trying to stop the internet from shitposting and saying hateful/racist things, yeah, good fucking luck lol

 

[CaesarCzech]

Good luck trying to keep up with the euphemism treadmill.


I can be fucking racist just with the tone of my voice lmao

reminds me of Googles.

 

[FAQnews Correspondent]

The creators of the Valorant Vanguard rootkit will now record your voice comms. Great.

 

[Blake Chortles]

That are legally required to adhere to the laws of the countries they operate in, or they won't be operating in them for long

This is like 2010 thinking.
Its a chinese company. They can do this if they want and nothing will happen.