Riot Games continues to eradicate hate speech from Valorant

Valorant will soon receive a new system for evaluating and analyzing text and voice chat. The developers announced this on their Twitter account, adding that the new feature will arrive in the game in an interim update, between major patches.

According to the developers, the system was tested on North American servers and analyzed information only in English. Most likely, it was implemented in 2022 when Riot Games began to more actively fight against toxic player behavior. After a year, the new system is starting to appear on all servers, which means it has been trained to analyze information presented in most of the languages spoken by the gaming community.

The test run gave us enough confidence to expand coverage to global languages, starting with an update in the middle and continuing with a phased rollout in all regions.

The Main Problem of Valorant

Despite all the efforts of Riot Games, toxicity and hate speech remain one of the main problems in the game. In 2022, according to The Anti-Defamation League, Valorant ranked first among competitive online games for the level of toxicity in the community. Obscene phrases and rude behavior are often found not only among ordinary players, but even among professionals, streamers, and content creators. You can read more about this in our article.

Also read: Toxic or Content Creator? Where have Valorant community norms gone?

Despite the fact that violation of behavior rules is the main problem of the game, not the entire community supports the introduction of the new system. In the comments, many regular players assume that the new system is not needed because the game already has the ability to mute an unpleasant player. This means that participating in a conflict or listening to it is a personal choice of each player, and the new system, in turn, will not be perfect and may ban players for simple words. For example, the community refers to another game from Riot Games - League of Legends, which also has a similar system, but it often fails. Players receive chat bans for simply typing character names or non-offensive phrases.