Underage Fortnite players need to be cautious of their language during their next online battle since Epic Games has announced the automatic addition of voice reporting to all matches with minors. The new feature aims to prevent harassment in Epic’s popular battle royale title and make it easier to report players who violate the game’s community rules.

How the voice reporting feature works

As reported by Polygon, Epic Games unveiled a new voice reporting feature for Fortnite. This moderation tool provides players with a method to prevent and report bullying, discrimination, and other types of harassment in the game. It is automatically enabled for all players under 18, allowing users to send a snippet of offensive audio to Epic moderators for review. The new feature supplements existing moderation tools, which allow players to block, mute, or report offensive players.

In a new post on the official Fortnite blog, Epic Games provides an overview of the game’s new voice reporting tool. When a player has voice reporting enabled, the last five minutes of in-game voice chat will be recorded on a rolling basis, ensuring that there’s always an audio record of potentially offensive comments. 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 over the age of 18 can opt out of voice reporting in most instances when using Party Channels, their audio will still be captured when playing in Game Channels.

Epic is the latest company to adopt new, high-tech tools designed to enhance the gaming experience. Activision has taken similar steps with one of its most popular franchises, recently adding voice moderation to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer matches to automatically identify and report hate speech, harassment, and other forms of toxicity. While some gamers may be apprehensive about 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.