League of Legends voice chat is finally happening, but only if you behave

The specter of League of Legends voice chat has hung over the MOBA for about as long as it has existed. Communication is essential to success, and while you can achieve a lot with the ping system and perhaps a quick, typed message, it's hard to beat speaking to your team directly to call out your intent mid-fight. 16 years on from launch, Riot Games is finally preparing to rip the band-aid off and introduce team voice to LoL - but, in service of protecting your experience, "it isn't going to happen fast."

Anyone who's played even one game of League of Legends can probably tell you why Riot has long been cautious of introducing such a feature. Monitoring voice comms is inherently harder than moderating text, and any potential toxicity is immediately exacerbated when someone's shouting it at you rather than simply typing it. LoL has to move with the times, however, and Riot is "ready to open a door we'd previously closed" at long last.

"Team-based competitive games have evolved since League was released," Riot admits. "When we launched, in-game voice communications weren't a standard in PC games. But now it's not only the norm, it's expected. As a team-based game with the potential to be hyper-competitive, it's something we have heard many of you felt was missing from League." After much consideration, it's changed its long-held stance, recognizing that the tool "has the potential to improve the overall gameplay experience for players that would like to use it."

Riot acknowledges the immediate concerns of "a world where some people use team voice to be jerks," but makes the bold claim that it's "committed to making sure that that world does not come to pass." The developer explains it "didn't pursue team voice chat earlier because it couldn't meet our standards for safety and reliability," but that modern technology makes it easier to catch bad actors on mic.

That means the feature isn't rolling out tomorrow. "We're going to extensively work, test, and iterate to make this a feature worthy of your trust," Riot continues. It plans to meet with "players around the globe" to listen to their hopes and fears for the feature and make sure what's implemented matches up to that standard. It's also considering bringing voice chat to just one language or region at a time, perfecting it there before moving to the next.

There's one other big factor: "No matter what, players will have to be in good standing in order to access team voice." That's not a complete failsafe, but it certainly does help to filter out some of the biggest troublemakers. Riot's also quick to note that the text chat and ping system aren't going anywhere, and that this should be considered an optional extra.

"Doing this the right way will take a lot of work and we aren't yet ready to share concrete details," the team concludes, "but you can expect to hear more from us on team voice later this year in a future dev update." I want to believe in you, LoL community, I really do; don't let me down.