It was one of the biggest talking points of February, but voice chat will not be coming to
League of Legends anytime soon, as Andrei “Meddler” van Roon, senior vice president at Riot Games, revealed
on Reddit this Monday, March 2. In a reply under a post discussing the Dev Update published the same day, Riot Meddler explained that “
It's not going to go live imminently” and that the leaks occurred “
before we were ready to talk about it.”
Previously addressed by Joe “New001” Tung, then Lead Producer of
LoL, in a
community-focused video on May 30, 2017, voice chat has long been a recurring topic among players of Riot Games’ MOBA.
On February 18, during a PBE update, dataminers discovered new references to the feature within the game files. Among them, the option to report a player for “voice comms abuse” now appears in the code. According to the X account SkinSpotlights, the files also include options to switch between team voice chat and party voice chat.
The leaks appear to have caught Riot Games off guard, as the feature still seems to be at an early stage of development. Meddler did confirm that the publisher “do have some work on voice chat going on,” but added that they are “not ready to talk further details just yet,” notably because of the leak. Although “It's not going to go live imminently,” the Senior Vice President acknowledged the challenges Riot Games must overcome before making voice chat available to all players.
