Valorant to start monitoring in-game voice chat starting July

Riot Games have announced that they will soon be monitoring in-game voice chat in Valorant to weed out more toxic behavior and provide players with a better competitive environment.

In a recent blog post, the developers went over some of the changes that they will be looking to introduce in-game in the upcoming month, and starting July 13, 2022, Riot will be recording and monitoring the English voice chat in North America.

This has been a bit of a controversial decision for Riot Games to make, as the community is not completely sold on the idea. As expected, many players are rather apprehensive and feel that this change will be a breach of their privacy.

Some even went on to suggest that it will cause other unwanted problems, such as unfairly banning a player from the game if their utterances are taken out of context. However, Riot Games have stood by their decision and maintained that the monitoring will be the background launch of a voice evaluation tool that they are planning to launch a beta of later this year.

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Valorant to introduce new voice monitoring technology to combat toxicity

In the post, Riot mentioned that the technology will record what players say in voice chat to determine which players are breaking any of their behavioral policies. The tool will primarily be used to detect disruptive player behavior and weed out those players who are overly toxic towards their teammates in the game.

The test, which starts next month, will currently only listen to the voice chat of English-speaking users, and to address the community's concerns, Riot Games have also mentioned that even if their technology does find someone to be disruptive, it will not automatically ban the player.

Furthermore, the Valorant developers plan to have systems in place to ensure that there are no false positives or negative results. When speaking about their upcoming technology, Riot Games stated:

“Voice evaluation during this period will not be used for disruptive behavior reports. That will only begin with the future beta. And we know that before we can even think of expanding this tool, we’ll have to be confident it’s effective, and if mistakes happen, we have systems in place to make sure we can correct any false positives (or negatives for that matter).”

The new voice recording technology will be Riot’s latest attempt at combating disruptive behavior in their titles.

The developers have previously removed the all-chat function in League of Legends to stop players from being overly toxic with each other.

The voice chat recording will be the next big step in combating disruptive behavior in Valorant, and players will be quite interested to see just how well the developers will be able to implement this new system, starting July 13.