Riot Games is gearing up to implement full team-based voice chat in League of Legends. It will be the first time players can communicate directly with all four solo-queue teammates simultaneously, moving beyond just premade party chat.
Code mentions and UI pieces for “enable team voice chat” have been spotted on the League of Legends Public Beta Environment, which means that this feature is likely being tested for live implementation. Current builds of the PBE show a voice menu where players can turn on team voice chat, select between push-to-talk and open mic, check their microphone, and assign hotkeys, much like in Riot’s tactical shooter, Valorant.
Most importantly, it seems that both joining team voice chat and auto-joining are turned off by default in these tests, which means that Riot is likely planning to make voice chat an opt-in feature on top of the current ping and text communication, rather than a requirement.
League has historically been the odd one out among the other competitive game titles in that it never had a way for the whole team to be heard, even as the frustration with misplays caused by uncommunicative solo queue players has been a growing problem in the community. While fans of voice chat believe that quicker, more natural ways to call out things like jungle paths, objective layouts, and cooldowns could ease many of the most infuriating aspects of solo queue play, it could also help close the communication gap between solo players and full teams.
This change also reignites a long-standing controversy about harassment, particularly against women and marginalized players, who already experience harassment at a disproportionate rate in voice chat-enabled games. Community leaders and content creators are demanding robust protections like strict reporting mechanisms, honor or account-standing requirements to use voice chat, and one-click muting for anyone who wants to keep League a text-only game.