Riot takes a step forward to reducing toxicity.
Riot Games today revealed an update to its Privacy policy thereby allowing it to ‘record and evaluate’ in-game communications in Valorant. It also announced the release date for a voice evaluation system which will train language models.
Combating toxicity is an ongoing battle for game developers. While text-based toxicity and abuse is relatively easier to tackle, voice comms are often a more difficult mode to monitor. Earlier this year, Riot announced results of its anti-toxicity efforts and outlined some future actions.
Riot Games has announced it will launch a voice evaluation system later this year that should aid in solving this problem.
Voice evaluation would provide a way to collect clear evidence that could verify any violations of behavioral policies before we can take any action. This would also help us share back to players why a particular action resulted in a penalty.
On July 13, Riot will launch the beta version of its voice evaluation system in North America. The beta will focus only on the English language for now.
While the voice evaluation system will focus on reports for that type of behavior, Riot has specified the system will not focus on disruptive behavior reports. This means players should specifically report voice communications to have it evaluated by the new system.
What about wrongful reports?
This is brand new tech and there will for sure be growing pains. But the promise of a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone who chooses to play is worth it.
However, in the future betas, disruptive behavior reports will also come under the purview of the voice evaluation system. The developers also said they have systems in place to correct false positives (or even negatives).
In the blogpost today, Riot also said the new system will be used in Valorant first. This might indicate efforts to use the system in other Riot titles such as League of Legends, Wild Rift etc in the future.
The technology is fairly new so it will be interesting to see its implementation in Valorant. It's a great step forward to combat toxic communications in the FPS Game.
Stay tuned to esports.gg for the latest Valorant news and updates.