What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Quite recently Riot announced something that I thought was actually going to be a really
big deal, and a few days have gone by and it’s actually really surprising to see that
no one seems to be talking about it.
So, let me be the one to start the conversation, as in a recent AskRiot post a couple of days
ago, Riot officially announced that Voice Chat will be coming to League of Legends in
some form eventually.
For the longest time, riot has had a fairly stubborn stance on voice chat with the mindset
of just simply choosing not to implement it into the game with the fear that the negatives
a voice chat system would bring would outweigh the positives.
And I guess its surprising that this isn’t being talked about more, because as far as
I know this is the first official time riot has declared pretty much that voice chat will
be coming to league of legends sometime in the future.
So the direct post from riot starts with the question “ If you value competitive team
play so much, why are you against voice chat?
It would really make games more coordinated.”
And the official response to that was “In the past, our stance on voice comms emphasized
the increased potential for negative behavior.
We've since reconsidered our philosophy around voice chat and while there are some challenges
we want to overcome (keeping it an opt-in experience, for example), we want to do it.We
believe League as a team sport should reward coordination, and that voice chat is a valuable
tool for getting teams (and strangers) aligned.
We'll probably begin deeper investigations once the League Client update is in a stable
release so we don't have to build the feature twice, but hopefully this is a clear update
on our philosophy and where we stand.
We'll also give you further updates when the time comes.”
Now there are a couple of things you can take from this post.
First off, it’s pretty clear that voice chat will definitely be coming eventually,
just not for a while, I would guess probably not until next season maybe, or until the
client update.
As well, when it does get implemented it is going to be an opt-in experience, meaning
that it will be completely optional to use for everyone.
I guess the interesting thing to me, which I kind of talked about in a previous video
is that Riot was actually developing a voice chat system during the beta of league of legends,
but it was scrapped because they decided voice chat was something they didn’t want to have
existing in the game.
So somewhere along the road recently, it seems like the community, or something has convinced
them to change their philosophies, which is pretty cool, and it looks they are trying
to implement it in a way that will be much more friendly to the user experience.
And I would say that I’m probably in favor of this decision, for a couple of reasons.
First off the fact that it would be completely optional to use makes it so that its hard
to justify any of the downsides of implementing it.
Anyone can choose to use or not use it, and the players who don’t like it won’t use
it.
However, it is important that an expectation for using voice chat does not develop.
If there is some level of expectation for everyone to use voice chat that can lead to
a lot of problems since players will be heavily discouraged from opting out of the system.
So the fact that it’s optional is great, and as long as it is truly optional, not just
optional but you expect everyone to be using it, then it should be okay.
One example I would like to use is perhaps Overwatch’s voice chat system.
Overwatch does their voice chat quite well since it is easy to avoid, and it is very
much optional in practicality and in actuality, Ive never not once jumped into an overwatch
game and have people give me a hard time for not using voice chat, and as long as its like
that in League, it’s going to bring nothing but positives to those who want it, and for
those who don’t want it, it’s most likely not going to bring any meaningful negatives.
As well, one thing that is a bit underappreciated when it comes to voice chat online is that
being able to voice chat amongst your team really humanizes every individual.
It really does humanize people in the sense that everyone will be much much less likely
to be toxic and rage at each other.
Sure, there will still be some people who do, but the amount of people flaming over
voice chat is by far a small fraction of the amount of people flaming over text chat.
It’s much easier to see your teammates as legitimate human beings when you can connect
a voice to the player, and although a lot of people cite toxicity as a potential problem
with voice chat, It’s not as bad as it seems, at least on paper.
The flip side is that when someone is toxic on voice chat, it can be a lot more hurtful
than when someone is flaming or raging over text.
So there’s kind of a tradeoff there, but toxicity overall almost certainly goes down
when there is voice chat, just because its much easier to treat someone like a legitimate
human being and be nicer when you hear their voice and develop that level of connection
that voice chat brings.
Think of the things some people say over text when they flame, I mean how many of those
people would honestly say that kind of stuff to someone’s face?
Certainly not as many people that would type it, that’s for sure.
So the biggest problem for toxicity that I can see is people being toxic at someone for
not using voice chat in like a ranked game or something, so again it’s just important
that the expectation of using voice chat does not develop.
And this is usually easy to accomplish on the developer’s end actually.
Doing something as simple as making it off by default and a little bit complicated to
turn on pretty much solves this problem completely actually, and we’ve seen this in other games,
one example of that being overwatch.
Now in overwatch, I personally don’t really use voice chat in public games, mostly because
I’m kind of shy, and it stresses me out a lot so I just choose not to use voice chat
most of the time unless I’m in a really social mood, and If voice chat gets released
to league I will probably be one of the people who won’t use it that often.
Now that said, I’m definitely still in favor of it being released, because it does bring
a lot of benefits to those who want it, and I understand that voice chat being added into
the game will probably not affect me in any way whatsoever, it certainly hasn’t hurt
my overwatch experience at not.
Because what voice chat will do, is add a lot to the competitive experience of the game.
A lot of people have complaints about how dynamic queue has made ranked much less competitive,
and adding voice chat is a good step towards making league of legends, ranked especially
a much more competitive environment since when you use it, it will of course be much
easier to communicate and make plays with your team.
And the main problem with voice chat, which is just that it can create a lot more problems
with toxicity, aren’t entirely true, and as long as it’s implemented properly, should
on paper be mostly nonexistent, or at least not much worse than the toxicity in the game
already is.
It’s interesting to see Riot change their philosophy on something that has been a pretty
controversial topic for a really long time, and I’m interested to see how it plays out
and what you guys think.
Maybe there’s something I’m missing here but it seems like it will be a good decision.
Either way, let me know what you guys think in the comments below, and if you enjoyed
the video hit that like button and if you didn’t hit that dislike, subscribe if you
want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!