Why Riot should never implement voice chat
By Josh Tyler
Season 9 starts in a week, with many new features like positional rank coming to the Rift. Once again, many summoners are wondering why Riot has elected not to add some form of voice chat to League of Legends. Well, it turns out there are a lot of good reasons for that.
Voice chat may very well be the most controversial topic remaining in League of Legends other than people who pick Riven. To many, the failure to add any sort of voice chat is Riot’s biggest failure, a blemish on the game overall, and destruction of competitive integrity.
Riot has long resisted adding voice chat, citing concerns about toxicity. Many players disregarded these reasons, saying that it’s all part of Riot’s desire to get everyone to “play nice” at the expense of gameplay.
Of all the controversial decisions Riot made, not adding voice is the easiest to understand. Adding the system would alienate some players, make bad games less enjoyable, and thus eat into their player base.
The question that is often posed is whether those costs outweigh the benefits of adding voice chat to improve the game. I’ll ask another question: are there even any benefits to adding voice chat?
In doing so, I’ll lay out the reasons why Riot has resisted voice chat, and why voice chat adds no benefit to League of Legends. You may disagree, citing other games like Dota 2, Overwatch, and CS:GO that have voice chat, but I will distinguish those games from League in how their use of voice poses some benefit that would not apply to Riot’s creation. Also, even the most ardent fans of Dota and Overwatch will admit that toxicity in those games is rampant.
Without further ado, all the reasons I hope Riot never adds a voice chat feature beyond the existing one for premades: