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(Image credit: Riot Games)

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Earlier this month,Riot Gamessent out some information about its terms of service being updated. Most of the changes are pretty uninteresting, except for one, which mostly concerns the content creator community.

“These updates ensure we’re evolving with games and the content ecosystem to make the best possible experience for our players and creators,” aRiot Games postsays. Now, Riot can punish players who spew hateful language or harmful rhetorics even if they aren’t doing so in voice or text chat—you just have to play a Riot game to be liable. This is called Off-Platform conduct.

“Our intention with this update is to help protect players from harmful behaviors they can experience across the various places that touch their gaming experience. This update applies very specifically and only to content where Riot’s games are the background of the content produced.”

“Though we aren’t going to proactively monitor everything that happens across social media, it is now within our rights to issue penalties in-game when that content is brought to our attention,” Riot continues. “As an example, if a creator uses hateful slurs about an opposing player or teammate on their stream but not in-game over chat or voice comms, we can still issue a penalty as if that behavior occurred in-game.

(Image credit: Riot)

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“If you say or do things that break our Terms of Service while broadcasting or creating content about our games, we can restrict access to your Riot accounts (and suspend your Partner privileges if you are part of our Partner Program).”

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The act of stream sniping is also getting more attention. This is apparently one of the biggest issues discussed within Riot’s community, and like buying/selling accounts also jeopardises competitive integrity. Riot is currently building a policy and a penalty system to combat this problem, although this is still in the early testing phase.

While the various tiers of punishment may seem unclear right now, the worst one has been specifically reserved for particularly egregious violations. Those who consistently spread hateful rhetoric in Riot games will be met with restricted access to all Riot accounts. So, if that’s your business model, you have until January 3, 2025, to change your ways—otherwise, there will be no moreValorantorLeague of Legendsfor you.

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