VALORANT’s April Fools’ Day joke about adding a lie detector to voice comms is a good idea

It’s April Fools’ Day, one of the worst days of the year if you work in games media thanks to an avalanche of fake announcements and joke updates. But amongst all the silliness there is the rare good idea, and we spotted one in today’s VALORANT “update.”

VALORANT “Update 4.1” introduced fans to swapped abilities and eye wash stations for flashes, and the trailer for this update also gave players a cursed look at Raze’s hands using Breach utility. But the final feature included in this year’s April Fools Day update was a “deception detector” that mutes you for the remainder of a round if you lie.

Now there are likely several legal and ethical hurdles to vault over if Riot actually wanted to implement a lie detector in their voice comm recognition software, as real-time lie detection would have to utilize AI in some fashion. But if they’re already recording and monitoring VALORANT comms to find toxicity and abusive language, why not just run those comms through a lie detector?

For teams to work well, there needs to be honesty amongst the players. Holding other players accountable is vital to success; just ask Sentinels coach kaplan about the impact Zellsis has had on the team that just won Masters Madrid. And for April Fools’ Day, the “deception detector” specifically highlights purposeful, malicious lying.

There are rare occasions though where lying is kind of necessary. If you’re playing with a lower ranked friend who’s not performing well, you’re somewhat obligated to gas them up.

But you know what kind of lying a “deception detector” in VALORANT would be most effective again? The absolutely putrid, dishonest fables that tilting, toxic players come up with when they’re losing. No one lies quite like children when they lose, and if they can be quiet for just a single round, that would be a relief.