Why hasn’t Riot figured it out yet that adding voice chat will create less toxicity?
There’s an ancient fallacy Riot has used to justify their stance on toxicity: that people win more games when they aren’t toxic. Statistically speaking, this is obviously true as any boosted bonobo can see, but if we’re being honest, you’re not going to be toxic to your teammates when you’re already winning the game, right? By this extension minimizing the player’s chances of losing minimizes their ability to be toxic. So how far would you reduce your chances of losing if, instead of arbitrarily pinging DANGER DANGER you said ‘Syndra blitz is coming get to turret?’ How much would you reduce your chances of losing a team fight if you were able to have a dialogue with your teammates on how to approach the fight instead of spending 5 minutes typing an essay while the enemy team takes a Dragon?
And say nothing of how it’ll help bridge the growing gap between solo queue and professional play as well. Half the champions that get nerfed in pro play are nerfed because they do well on a coordinated team, and while those nerfs still leave them as solid picks in pro play, it totally ruins their playability in solo queue (examples off the top of my head include Kench, Galio, & Shen.) I wouldn’t be so bold as to say it would make balancing pro play and solo queue one and the same, but it would certainly make Tahm Kench feel like less of a troll pick if you had the ability to tell your adc ‘they backed and mid is pushing, let’s ult to mid and set up a kill’ rather than trying to ping ASSIST ME ASSIST ME four times, spend four minutes typing your plan, and then missing your opportunity to execute your plan because you spent four minutes doing something that takes four seconds in any other modern game.
Riot at this point what do you have to justify not adding voice chat to all matches? You can’t say it wouldn’t take more than a few weeks (dare I say DAYS) to add since you already have it for parties. You can’t say it wouldn’t be hard to develop a punishment system for verbally toxic players since you’re a billion dollar company (we’re not cavemen, we have TECHNOLOGY.) The only reasons I can think of that you haven’t added voice comms yet is you believe it’ll somehow underscore your draconian stance on verbal abuse (admitting the solution to toxicity is simply players muting players instead of reporting them for a permaban,) but at the end of the day what does that matter? What’s wrong with allowing players to self-regulate their experiences with other players? Adding features would never take away from the game, it’d only IMPROVE it, and those who don’t want to use voice chat can simply disable it.
This joke has gone on for almost as long as the game’s been around, and honestly it’s getting old
