The long-awaited built-in functionality for League of Legends voice chat has finally entered the production phase after months of consideration.
Posting on the official website earlier today, product manager Kristoffer “Soundwave” Touborg revealed that the implementation of “League Voice” will be part of major changes incoming to the party system. Instead of allowing everyone to communicate with each other in a game on a global scale, support will be limited to just the premade groups. This is to minimize toxicity that is always a likely concern in such features.
“We are currently not planning on expanding League Voice to team members outside of your premade party,” Riot Games made it clear. “Playing with friends usually makes for a safer environment than playing with strangers, and until we have better tools to help address abusive scenarios with strangers, we will not be implementing it outside of premades.”
Riot Games stated earlier this year that an in-game League of Legends voice support feature does not hold priority on the table. That was followed by reports that some manner of progress has been made, only to be labelled as false by the developer later on.
In addition to the in-game voice chat, the party system will be tweaked to allow the invitation of others from the end-of-game screen without adding them as friends. There will also be an option to host “open parties” that can be freely joined by friends, curbing the need to spam invites.
The new changes will make the party system function similar to other popular applications such as Discord and TeamSpeak. The only difference being that it will be part of the client.
Riot Games has not provided a timeline but it should arrive sometime during the eighth season next year. This is certainly ending up as a mighty fruitful pre-season for the game.
