The Real Reason Riot Will Be Listening To Your Valorant Matches

Riot Games is officially rolling out a new feature to combat toxicity and bad behavior in "Valorant," although the feature itself is a bit suspect in the eyes of some fans. With "Valorant" being a free-to-play online tactical shooter, it certainly has seen its fair share of toxicity from fans. According to fan polls, "Valorant" has even been considered as one of the most toxic games in the biz. Luckily for fans, Riot Games is also behind "League of Legends," and so it has a great deal of experience when it comes to keeping an eye on toxic gamers. In fact, Riot Games had previously revealed that it was going to start recording online voice chat to combat toxicity. Fans were not happy with the idea when it was first brought up last year.

Now, Riot Games has confirmed that starting on July 13, North American/English voice-chats will be recorded to combat toxic behavior. This will serve as a testbed to possibly expand this feature to other regions and games. In this initial testing period, however, the system will not be used to intercept disruptive behavior reports from players. Riot Games will instead be working on it manually, listening in to help teach the system how to detect these issues automatically. 

While Riot Games and other developers can easily check when a player is reported for disruptive behavior in text chat, voice chat reports can be a bit trickier when it comes to verifying bad behavior. And obviously, some fans are concerned about how this technology will be used.

Fans are already concerned about the implications of Riot Games listening to them in-game and recording their conversations. It seems many players just want to make sure that Riot is only doing it when pertinent. On Reddit one user wrote, "I don't really have an issue with this as long as it's only being looked at if there are multiple reports. I do not want to be constantly monitored if there's no sus activity happening."

While some users are flippant about "Valorant" recording their data since so many other tech companies are already doing it, some have concerns about Riot Games' corporate overlords, Tencent. "You're extremely generous if you think Tencent are only going to use your data for these very specific stated purposes," another user wrote.

In between arguing over privacy concerns and corporate trust, a few users remarked that they are excited for the feature, as some of their fellow "Valorant" players are apparently very comfortable using slurs in voice chat, which obviously needs to go away. Riot Games has been causing waves in the "Valorant" community lately, most recently announcing the removal of one the game's original maps. Only time will tell how this new voice chat monitoring system will be viewed by fans of the game once it's in practice.