Riot Games has officially confirmed that Team Voice is coming to League of Legends. We first knew about Team Voice coming to League of Legends a few weeks ago. Following weeks of speculation. Alongside the announcement, the developers shared their philosophy on communication and competitive integrity.
Team Voice: A New Era for League of Legends?
The addition of Team Voice chat is going to add a new layer of communication to the game, for better or worse. While multiplayer games thrive on coordination, is voice what the Rift actually needs?
Riot Games is clearly aware of the potential for in-game toxicity:
As a team-based game with the potential to be hyper-competitive, it’s something we have heard many of you have felt was missing from League. The text chat and ping system have served you all well for years (and will continue to for years to come), but we want to provide Team Voice for those of you who want to communicate seamlessly with your teammates. We think when done well, team voice chat opens up the doors for enhanced teamwork and coordination, and has the potential to improve the overall gameplay experience for players that would like to use it.
“When done well” is how this feature will live or die. The issue isn’t just technical; it’s the League of Legends community. A good example of this is the “missing” ping. Represented as a “?” the intention is to let people know that your laner is not here. What it has become is a “why did you do that” ping to spam on someone who does something stupid. But how do you fix that? You can limit the use, or punish the abuse, but you still need it in the game because most of the time it’s used for good.
Can Riot Actually Moderate Voice Comms?
Team Voice, however, opens up another can of worms for Riot Games to deal with. Monitoring voice coms:
We’re listening to your concerns…. So we’re going to extensively work, test, and iterate to make this a feature worthy of your trust. Some of this work includes meeting with players around the globe to get feedback on their concerns and making sure Team Voice meets their expectations. Other options we’re exploring to ensure quality include rolling this feature out one language/region at a time, making it great in each one before introducing it to the next. Additionally, no matter what, players will have to be in good standing in order to access Team Voice. We’re working through the exact criteria for evaluating that now, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated.
There is no official release date for League Team Voice yet, as Riot plans to roll it out region-by-region to ensure quality.
We don’t have exact timelines right now because doing this the right way will take a lot of work and we aren’t yet ready to share concrete details, but you can expect to hear more from us on Team Voice later this year in a future Dev Update.
Why Now?
Riot stated the timing is finally right because their AI technology to identify “bad actors” has finally met their standards for safety:
We didn’t pursue team voice chat earlier because it couldn’t meet our standards for safety and reliability. But that’s changed based on advances in our technology to identify bad actors
Time will tell how this goes down. For the most part, Valorant, Counter-Strike 2, and Overwatch, etc, have it down ok. People will always abuse it, but in theory, people want to win. There is an argument that speaking an insult to someone is a lot harder than typing it. You hear the person; this can open another can of worms for Riot, especially in very mixed regions such as EUW.
Overall, the feature sounds promising, but whether it is used or not will remain to be seen. It feels like something high ELO players might get the best use out of. I’m not sure I want to talk to the type of people I play with in Platinum and Emerald.
