Despite being one of the biggest esports titles in the world, League of Legends still lacks a feature that’s already commonplace in nearly every major competitive team-based game out there: voice chat. However, Riot Games has confirmed that this might not be the case moving forward, as the MOBA may receive built-in team voice chat in the near future.
The official announcement from Riot comes less than a month after dataminers managed to dig up the PBE game files to uncover the existence of “voice comms abuse reporting” within the game files in February, suggesting that this highly anticipated feature might just be on the horizon.
At the time of writing, League of Legends does include a limited form of voice chat through its party voice feature, which allows players to communicate with others in the same party. At the same time, though, most premade parties tend to rely on third-party platforms like Discord for voice comms instead.
In Riot’s latest blog post on the topic, the company acknowledged the importance of voice chat in team-based games and reassured players that they’re working on bringing team-based voice comms to LoL.
“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 LoL devs said in a statement. “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.”
Riot further said that the devs didn’t focus on implementing voice chat earlier because it failed to meet their standards for “safety and reliability.” The company then claimed that its technology for identifying and dealing with bad actors has since improved, which has prompted the team to revisit the idea of adding voice chat to League of Legends.
Since many players have previously expressed concerns about potential toxicity following the implementation of voice chat in LoL, Riot is exploring ways to maintain its quality and safety. One option the company is considering is rolling the feature out one language or region at a time, ensuring it works well in each before expanding it further.
Lastly, the devs confirmed that LoL players will have to be in good standing in order to access Team Voice, preventing the more toxic players from accessing this feature in the first place.
The devs have yet to provide players with an exact release date for team voice chat in League of Legends.