Ummm Riot... what are you doing?

YAMETE!

Riot games are a studio teeming with online experience and the potential to seize ever newer online ventures in the endlessly expanding future. Whilst handfuls of other studios in the world today bemoan the trials of online infrastructure work and flounder at the very prospect, Riot have been working in that field for the better part of the last 12 years, so they should recongise every challenge and how to handle it with grace. That's the reason why all those the online dabblers out there who insist it's literally impossible to launch a polished experience from the get-go, (Todd Howard) find themselves shutting right the heck up when Riot Games rock up and drop the hugely successful Counter-strike successor; Valorant, which works out the box. Of course, that isn't to say Valorant never had it's issues, such as a inherently dubious anti-cheat software that seemed built to one day be exploited either within the company or without; but we haven't had any serious breaches with that just yet and so the standard operating procedures in such an event is to carry on like there's no problem and act deeply surprised when you turn around one day and find your email is getting sold on the Deep Web. (whoops.)

But I'm not here to harper on about the 'root-kit' anti-cheat system again. I'm sure those eggs with hatch by their own one day and do all the talking that they need to, no instead I want to talk about something a lot closer to home, something that requires no mid-level tech knowledge to comprehend, and something that isn't even a specific problem of Valorant's to fix. It's the issue of many different online games out there, (although not, as some alarmists would have you believe, all online games) that whenever we come down to voice chat there's a certain level of- inherent hostility, shall we say, that a lot of folk get subjected to, and it tends to make the gaming experience worse. Talk to some folk out there and they'll refer to it as 'toxicity', but I personally never liked that expression because it's been overused to meaninglessness. In a nutshell, sometimes people out there are right asses on voice chat, and that's something that Riot have found some interesting ways to tackle.

Now I know that if you've been around here any length of time you might be thinking back on my personal opinions on online gaming and thinking "Whatchu know about 'voice chat' abuse anyway? You don't even have any friends and/or play online games." For which you would usually be right, however you're actually wrong. You see I did have me some MMO days (surprise, I guess) and a lot of the time the people I'd play with were total randoms who I just happened across and would sometimes, though not often, chat with them. I also played GTA Online back in the day, and was rather good at it, (I only ever lost 5 deathmatches out of hundreds played) so I'm no stranger to receiving torrents of random abuse out of literally nowhere for just playing the game. And even though my MMO days were generally much more tame, there were points when you just had a bad day, and the right comment at the right time just hits you harder than it should, and then you just don't want to play that game anymore for at least a week. You could argue that's the same with general conversation and social interaction in general, but we've all been in lockdown for over a year so who can even remember at this point?

Of course the stickler here is the whole 'being driven out of the game' aspect of online discourse. When you jump into a game lacking perhaps some of the on-the-point reflexes or experience of some of the other players, sometimes that can become a point of online ridicule. Maybe you're just having an off-day, and someone out there feels the need to rub it in as though you can't see that those numbers yourself. Maybe you just have the wrong sounding type of voice that sets off weirdos in the lobby, say if you happen to be a girl or have a non-American accent. This can lead to folk getting the ol' voice chat harassment and lead to that game, in the minds of the receivers, getting associated with negative emotions, rather than with the elation of victory. Maybe they'll start concluding that the stress isn't worth it, and move away from that game entirely. Then you've got a community of elitist players who rule your game's infrastructure and stamp out any new players by being generally unwelcoming, stanching the growth of your player base and eventually reflecting back on the bottom line. (and then you need to hire Nevercake to voice 100 adverts for you.) As you can imagine, this is when it becomes important to the studio that this crap needs to stop.

Yes, make no mistake this comes down to the company worrying about the user base being stunted, at no point are they worrying about your well being. (those two ends just happen to align for this singular instance.) But how does one go about fixing the rude people over voice chat, I wonder? Well for Riot that process starts with recording voice cha- what? No seriously, what? You've already gotten crap with issues regarding how invasive your anti-cheat software is, and now you want to turn around and start recording people's conversations? Are you high? This is a real thing, Valorant is going to start recording voice chats with players so that they later can confirm accusations of toxic speech. Why does that matter? These guys have a shotgun-approach to this sort of stuff anyway, they just accept the account of the 'victim' no questions asked and dish out bans usually. Now they're going to start a whole privacy concern just to introduce 'evidence' into the equation? Why? You ain't a court, you don't need to go through 'due process'. Either they're lying about the endgoal of this new feature, or this is a classic case of overreacting to fix the problem.

Let's start with the fact that this isn't going to specifically address the problem of problematic chat abuse in the game, but the wider problem of people talking at all using in-game voice chat. (if, indeed, you see people communicating as a problem.) I'm sure that general orders and just playing the game is going to remain just fine, but what about casually  chatting and having fun with teammates? If I know my voice is going into the Riot databases, I'm not going to be nearly as affable to the newbies I happen across. And they'll likely turn around and say, as they always do, "We're not going to do anything untoward with this data, it's purely accessed only when it needs to be"; but we're not idiots here, Riot, even if you never honestly exploit this, someone will. Or even discounting the very real possibility of hackers getting this data, what happens when Riot suddenly decides that they want to combat toxicity before it happens, and isolate those that may be a problem to new players. Why, then it's entirely justified within their minds to start shifting through private voice chats between players in search of a smoking gun like this is 'The Winter Solider' or 'Minority Report' or something. Claim "they'd never do that!" all you like, but don't turn back around on me when it actually happens because that's just the natural progression of 'efforts' like this. ('the road to hell'- as they say.)

And what if Riot isn't on the up and up about exactly why they want to start recording what people sound like, the things they talk about and the times at which they play? I mean, and this is purely supposition with literally no evidence pointing to reality; but this would make for wonderful data to be sold to advertisers should they want to better marketing algorithms. Valorant is, afterall, a free-to-play game which makes it's bread-and-butter trying to swindle players on over priced side content, is it such a leap to assume they'd start mishandling player date too? (I'm sure apologists argue "but they're the one's who set the value of microtransactions", which is the exact attitude adopted of those who are prime swindling targets) What I'm trying to say is, Riot have shown that they're not above trying to dupe their customers for a bit of extra dough, so letting them off the hook for recording voice chat would be nigh on silly. Maybe it's not an issue today, or tomorrow, but someday it will be. Do you want to entrust them with that ticking time bomb regardless of acknowledging that?

At the end of the day, I just think there are better and more involved methods that Riot can go about trying to fix it's voice chat problems. Because I feel like this is an issue of community composition over one of trying to bully players into behaving how you want them to under threat of video-taped blackmail. (That was hyperbolic on purpose, I loathe having to clarify) Be clearer about the types of people who are and are not welcome in your community, let the undesirables see the door, cater game modes specifically for those who want more casual play, charge less for skins on the skin store. (You might think that last one is unrelated, but think about the ecosystem of superiority that premium skins reinforces. Also, those prices are whack, seriously.) Maybe if Riot put as much effort into crafting their community as they do into marketing we wouldn't be looking at these quietly dystopian measures looming over our heads. Or maybe we would anyway, Riot might just be creepy like that.