League of Legends players might spend countless hours brawling with each other, communicating through the ancient art of murder and mayhem, but what they can’t do is have a simple chat. While a voice chat feature does exist, it’s limited to party members, and because of that, it’s gone underused.
That Riot Games has steered clear from adding fully fledged voice chat to League might not be too surprising when you consider the reputation its community has earned. In 2023, Riot developer Joe White noted that its introduction could create new problems, “especially for women and POC who get unfairly targeted by simply participating in voice comms”.
However, voice chat has actually never been properly tested in League—at least not outside of esports and parties. On top of that, all the other major competitive online games, like Valorant, Apex Legends, Counter-Strike 2, and Call of Duty have voice chat. Although the League community is notoriously toxic, it’s hard to find reasons why Riot hasn’t even trialled the feature, giving the players at least the benefit of the doubt.
While not all players agree voice chat would be a great addition to the game, the League community has been asking for it for years now. Not only would it help players communicate vital pieces of information and reduce the number of unnecessary throws, but it would also help to bring League up to the modern gaming standards of highly competitive games.
Play to win
No matter if you’re a regular ARAM enjoyer or a hardcore Solo Queue grinder, we all want to win in League. To do this, you need to keep track of your enemies on the minimap, along with their cooldowns and items; the spawn times of objectives; your positioning, tempo, and farming; and whatever potential crises your teammates might be dealing with. But it’s considerably easier to play the game when that burden is shared among all five players and you can always ask in voice chat, “Where’s the enemy jungler?”
Having all players in voice chat also adds an additional level of competition—with both teams on an even playing field, at least in terms of communication. This can best be felt during Clash tournaments, as most teams use Discord to increase their odds of winning and coordinate at a higher level. A lot of Clash matches are filled with nailbiting and adrenaline-fueled moments which likely never would have happened without voice chat.
The alternative, namely using pings, just doesn’t cut it. We’ve all been there—spamming pings to our teammates so they don’t go into the jungle, and they do it anyway, giving away a huge bounty and an objective. This might happen because they have pings turned off, you’re on mute, or they are tunnel-visioning on the amazing play they have in mind. This entire situation, however, could be easily avoided with voice comms.
In some instances, you might not understand what the player is trying to tell you with their pings, especially when you’re in the middle of a teamfight or skirmish. For example, a player might use the “On my way” ping during a skirmish, but you might not know if they are about to join the fight or if they plan on jumping at a nearby enemy. Pings would remain quite useful even with voice comms for fast communication without players trying to speak over one another, but they aren’t as effective as the primary method.
War council
Two of the main concepts in League are micro and macro. While micro refers to your mechanical skills such as positioning and using cooldowns timely, macro involves aspects of the game such as objective control, roaming, rotations, and overall strategization. Although League is packed with action and many players rely on their micro to climb, macro is equally important, if not more so, mainly because no amount of mechanical prowess can help you if you don’t know how to get the most out of a Baron buff.
But the macro side of things suffers without clear communication. Absent voice comms, you don’t really have much time to plan out a strategy that would work for your team composition. Of course, you can use text chat, but realistically speaking, you don’t have enough time to type out a full-blown strategy, let alone discuss it with teammates. Voice chat would allow you to DPS Baron Nashor and devise your next steps while you’re doing that.
And when you’re strategizing like this, or saving a teammate’s bacon by warning them of trouble ahead, or coming to their aid when called, you’re being humanized and generating camaraderie. League’s reputation for toxic players is a bit of a generalization, but restrictions like this arguably make that rep harder to shake by not allowing players to show that they won’t sink into the worst kinds of behaviors the moment their voice can be heard.
I am by no means saying everyone would suddenly become model players, transforming League into a utopia, but players would be incentivized to collaborate even more. If the situation gets out of control, there are options to mute the toxic individuals and report them through in-game tools. Riot has been stricter and stricter over the past couple of years with troublemakers, and has developed more systems to handle toxicity.
The most common way of monitoring voice chat is usually by recording and then reviewing it. Activision uses AI to review recordings in Call of Duty, for instance, and in Valorant Riot started rolling out the beta of its AI voice evaluation system all the way back in 2022. As per its audio file and transcript retention policies, it generates audio files and transcripts when a report is made or a violation is detected, and if there’s a breach of the community code this can result in a comms restriction, a teamplay restriction, or an outright ban, from one day to permanent.
While AI allows support teams to quickly review a number of recordings, you can argue that it’s missing that human touch and the ability to properly determine whether the behavior in question is worthy of a restriction or a ban. The best approach to punishing toxic players would be by combining both the support team and AI, but there’s no perfect approach to creating a toxicity-free environment in competitive gaming. Riot clearly sees the value in trying to foster a less abusive community in Valorant, though, going so far as to invest in new tech, and it seems wasteful to not apply this to League as well.
The season of chat
Adding voice chat wouldn’t miraculously solve League’s toxicity problem, and there would still be players who would avoid it. However, that could put them at a heavy disadvantage and they’d have to work with the information forwarded to them via pings and text chat. However, adding the option to simply listen in on comms would easily solve that. Unfortunately, the sentiment of not being able to join due to the risk of abuse would remain. But issues like this won’t be resolved if a full voice chat feature isn’t at least tested—it simply hides the problems rather than confronting them.
It’s time to at least try it and give players an opportunity to prove to Riot they can work together. An interesting, yet safe way to do that would be to implement a seasonal voice chat that would work only in Solo Queue. That way, Riot could test out the impact of voice chat on the quality of games and the levels of toxicity. On top of this, Riot could use the gathered data as a foundation to further reduce toxicity and improve the future iterations of voice chat.
It’s hard to say if Riot will ever be able to spruce up the community to such an extent that voice chat would be added, but given that League is a highly competitive game where you depend on team communication, there are so many reasons why it should exist. League is an entirely different game when players collaborate towards the same goal—destroying the enemy Nexus.
