Home > News

Valorant Players: Riot Games Will Be Listening to Your Chats

By Laura Tucker
Riot Games Valorant Chat Featured

Does the chat room in your gaming sessions get to be a free-for-all? One gaming company wants to put an end to that. Riot Games announced that starting in July, it will be listening in on the voice chats between Valorant players.

Also read: How to Make Your Windows Gaming Laptop Play Longer on Battery

Riot Games’ Announcement

Riot Games has a plan in place to stop abusive comments in the online chats during Valorant gameplay. It’s something it laid the groundwork for more than a year ago.

The game-maker made a change to its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service in April 2021. It allows Riot Games to “record and evaluate in-game voice communications when a report for that type of behavior is submitted.”

Riot Games Valorant Chat Pc Gaming
Image source: Unsplash

If you say something offensive in a game and a fellow player lodges a complaint, Riot’s new policy gives them the right to listen in on your chat and decide for themselves if your comments are disruptive.

With the rule on the books for some time, Riot Games is finally putting it to use and will make good on the threat starting July 13. If you like to use offensive language when playing Valorant, take note.

However, when Riot Games begins monitoring the Valorant chats, it won’t initially be to restrict “disruptive behavior.”

Riot Games Valorant Chat Keyboard Mouse
Image source: Unsplash

The goal on July 13 will be to “help train our language models and get the tech in a good enough place for a beta launch,” said the game-maker. Next month it will launch the new “voice evaluation system in North America/English only.”

“Voice evaluation would provide a way to collect clear evidence that could verify any violations of behavioral policies before we can take any action,” said Riot Games. It will help them understand what they’re dealing with and “help us share back to players why a particular action resulted in a penalty.”

“Brand New Tech” for Valorant

Riot Games is phrasing it as “brand new tech” for Valorant – but no matter how the company phrases it, there are bound to be players upset that their voice chat will be monitored.

“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,” said the company in its announcement.

Riot Games Valorant Chat Community Code
Image source: Riot Games

This is a continuation of tactics Riot Games has used to keep a safe environment in Valorant. Earlier, it started a “muted words list” that allows Valorant players to add words they consider offensive.

But perhaps a company that calls itself “Riot Games” shouldn’t be so surprised at the chatter of its players. It seems they were courting violence to begin with.

While you could opt out of the voice chat to avoid being monitored and use Discord instead, know that it doesn’t come without its own troubles.

Image credit: Riot Games

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.