Why Riot should never implement voice chat

8. We don’t need it

If you still believe that, despite all the negativity and toxicity voice chat will bring, and the fact that it won’t really have an effect on gameplay, answer me one question: what information would you need to communicate over voice chat that you cannot currently communicate with pings? This has always been my final point to the advocates of voice chat, and no one has yet to dissuade me of my belief that League of Legends has a perfectly adequate communication system in place with pings.

To start with, pings are just plainly better for in-game communication than voice chat. A University of Greenwich study titled “Efficient in-game communication in collaborative online multiplayer games” concluded that voice chat:

did not present the slowest completion time despite an overwhelming amount of unhelpful chat. In contrast, pre-determined commands had no discursive actions due to participants being unable to speak freely, as well as the fastest completion time, presumably due to their inability to formulate their own messages.

Essentially, voice chat provided the most communication volume, but most of it was unhelpful communications. On the other hand, predetermined commands (aka pings) produced the fastest time to complete various tasks or objectives in-game. Pings are the best form of communication, according to this study, because they don’t clutter our mind with useless information, they’re easy to recognize and respond to, and they’re simple.

The study did acknowledge that in some cases, voice chat commands might be superior to pings in quick-trigger situations, where it’s easier to communicate quickly and curtly over voice than to ping. However, these benefits would likely only apply to LoL in the context of team fights.

In a team fight, quickly calling out an enemy’s spell usage (e.g. “Sejuani ulted” or “Kindred flashed”) or make snap decisions (e.g. “I’m going to flash in and stun them” or “stop damaging the baron”) would absolutely be best communicated by voice as opposed to pings. This is why shooters generally do have a voice element, so players can call out enemy abilities (“Zarya is ulting”) or locations (“Soldier is on our right”).

In those games, big fights and small skirmishes are happening constantly, which is why voice can be helpful. However, in League, the game progresses slowly. There is no period of constant skirmishing and team fighting, except when a player gets caught out or teams are posturing around an objective. For perhaps 90% of the game, players have ample time to communicate with pings (e.g. pinging “on my way” for a gank or pinging “back” and “mana 10%” to indicate you cannot help in that gank) or text (e.g. quickly typing for your Vayne to catch that wave that’s going to crash into the tower).

The beauty of League of Legends is that it is not a go-go-go game, but rather one that ebbs and flows. During the downtime, voice chat is completely inferior to pings and only has the ability to create conflict among teammates. Teammates will flood the voice channel with insults, discursive commands (i.e. commands that need additional explanation), arguments, or simply silence.

All of these points lead me to one question that the proponents of voice chat must answer: is it worth it to add a system that will target a large share of players disproportionately, allow toxicity to worsen and go unchecked, when there’s already an existing communication system that is superior in 90% of all instances and the new system might not even work? If you still say yes, it’s worth it, be lucky that we’re not in voice chat together so you don’t have to hear my howls of laughter.

Still not convinced that voice chat has no benefit to League of Legends? Let us know what we didn’t consider in the comments below!