Riot Games will begin monitoring “North American/English-only” voice communications in Valorant beginning July 13 as it expands its effort to reduce toxicity and player harassment in the popular first-person shooter.
Riot laid the foundation for this move back in April 2021 when it made an update to its privacy policy with new terms that would allow it to “record and potentially evaluate voice data when using Riot-owned voice comms channels.” However, for now, the company says that it won’t be using these voice evaluations to assess any behavior reports, promising that it’s simply a background launch designed to aid it in training language models as it continues to perfect the technology. Players should expect a beta launch sometime later in the year.
“We know that before we can even think of expanding this tool, we’ll have to be confident it’s effective,” Riot said in the statement. “And if mistakes happen, we have systems in place to make sure we can correct any false positives (or negatives for that matter).”
Given that most games don’t monitor voice chats, it’s reasonable that some players could be concerned about Riot impeding their privacy. However, once the feature goes into full effect in the future, the company claims that it won’t “actively monitor” your voice communications. Instead, it will only seek out and replay your conversations as a reaction to reported voice channel abuses. Additionally, you’ll be notified if and when your voice logs are reviewed, at which point the data will be deleted and you’ll find out whether or not you’re receiving any kind of disciplinary action on your account.
Though it may feel like a big step forward in the fight against hate speech and harassment, this isn’t the first thing Riot has done to fight back against player toxicity. It overhauled its penalty system for text-based offenses in 2021, then it added the ability for players to add specific words to a muted words list earlier this year.
Valorant is available now for PC.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.