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Underage Fortnite players may want to watch their words during their next online battle as Epic Games has announced that it is automatically adding voice reporting to all matches with minors moving forward. The new Fortnite feature is designed to prevent harassment in Epic’s popular battle royale title and make it easier to report players who break the game’s community rules.
Epic Games adds automatic voice reporting in Fortnite for all players under 18
As originally reported by Polygon, Epic Games introduced a new voice reporting feature to Fortnite on Thursday. The moderation feature gives players a new tool to prevent and report bullying, discrimination, and other forms of harassment in Fortnite. Automatically enabled for all players under 18, voice reporting allows gamers to send a snippet of offending audio to Epic moderators for review. The new voice reporting feature is meant to supplement existing moderation features which already allow players to block, mute, or report offensive players.
In a new post on the official Fortnite blog, Epic Games gives an overview of how the game’s new voice reporting tool works. When a player has voice reporting enabled, the last five minutes of in-game voice chat will be recorded on a rolling basis to ensure that there’s always an audio record of potentially offensive comments. To address potential privacy concerns, Epic’s post assures players that all recordings are stored locally on a player’s machine, whether that’s a PC or console, and are never uploaded to Epic’s servers. While players who are over the age of 18 have the option of opting out of voice reporting in most instances when using Party Channels, their audio will still be captured when playing in Game Channels.
Epic is just the latest company to introduce new, high-tech tools designed to make playing its games a more pleasant experience. Activision has been taking similar steps with one of its most popular franchises, and recently added voice moderation to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer matches to automatically identify and report hate speech, harassment, and other forms of toxicity. And while some gamers are likely to bristle at the thought of Epic keeping a record of their in-game conversations, the new voice reporting tool could help make most players’ next round of Fortnite feel just a little bit friendlier.