If you’ve been playing a lot of League of Legends lately, you might wonder the game doesn’t have a good voice chat facility. The game is based around teams of players, many of them random, working together to beat another team. To win, players need to be coordinated. However, the only form of in-game communication for a match is text chat and a limited voice chat. You can’t monitor text chat all the time, leading to key moments of the match being missed. So why doesn’t LoL have voice chat like other similar games? The definitive answer to this is as follows.
LoL doesn’t have full voice chat since it’s harder to control and monitor than text chat. The in-game communication can be negative and abusive and therefore needs to be controlled by Riot. Developer Riot Games have always been hesitant to add full voice chat to the game because of the possibilities it opens up for players shouting obscenities at one another.
LoL Party Chat
Riot Games monitor all in-game chat. The developer needs to identify abusive individuals and punish them for breaking terms of use, including being abusive to others. This is easier with a text chat because certain words and phrases can be tracked. When you implement a voice chat, you need a far more complex system to track what people are saying. Even then, it’s impossible to catch every abusive individual, even if they’re reported.
That’s why Riot Games added Party voice chat to LoL in patch 8.6. This means you can join a party with anyone in your friend list and speak to them through in-game voice chat. However, you cannot use this to talk to random players in a given match.
Not Everyone Can Use Voice Chat
The main reason Riot Games has given for only adding party voice chat is the disadvantage it puts other players at. Not all players can use voice chat, and many don’t want to. If it was enabled for everyone, players could kick others out of a match to refuse to use it. This would lead to far more problems than it could ever solve. The priority is a fun experience over serving those individuals who could use other services such as Discord instead.
LoL Chat Can Be Toxic
Another reason that Riot Games will probably never add full voice chat to LoL is the fact that a lot of the in-game chat is toxic. Most players try to use the chat to coordinate. However, there are those who use it to be negative towards other players when they don’t play at a certain skill level.
LoL has a huge player base. As such, there’s a colossal skill gap between new players and those who have hundreds of hours under their belt. Unfortunately, some players who believe they have a high level of skill don’t want to play with new players, which is where toxicity can come into the chat.
When I first started playing the game, I found that players were all too ready to type abuse in capitals into the chat. However, if you say you’re new, more players will chime in to try to help you out than those who are toxic. Overall, the community wants to help new players, but there is still a definite toxic element.
Conclusion
To summarize, Lol doesn’t have voice chat because it causes more problems than it solves. It’s not a system that Riot Games has any reason to develop to their game. LoL is popular without full voice chat, and they’ve provided reasons why they aren’t adding it moving forward.
You might need to learn how to play LoL and generally level up your skills. If so, check out our article on how LoL MMR works here.
