In a “League of Legends” game update released Oct. 12, Riot Games declared they would be removing “/all chat” in patch 11.21 in an attempt to reduce negative interactions. There are two ways to communicate with fellow gamers. “Team chat” is sent to only players on your own team, while “/all chat” (named after the function required to use it) is visible to both teams; either chat can be muted. After receiving a lot of backlash from the community, Riot Games made the decision to only implement the removal of “/all chat” for certain regions, the names of which haven’t been released yet.
The absurdity of this decision is obvious since “/all chat” is completely optional and is turned off by default. Any player using “/all chat” does so by choice. The game update also states that emotes (dances and emojis) and other interactions from the other team will not be removed. These are usually the perpetrators of toxicity from the other team by flashing mastery and spamming emotes, both things that show poor sportsmanship.
While there might be some bad moments, “/all chat” generally leads to fun banter and makes the game more enjoyable, since it doesn’t feel like playing against a bot. On many occasions, I’ve befriended an opponent using “/all chat” and continued to play more games with them later. It is one of the few things in this game that builds a sense of camaraderie.
Most would agree that toxicity in chat in “League of Legends” mostly comes from your own team. Because of the heavily group-based gameplay, mistakes by one player affect everyone. More so, toxicity from your own team is much more hurtful than the other team and affects gameplay. Obviously, removing “team chat” would be preposterous, but removing “/all chat” fixes nothing.
This new update was even more disappointing to those who were hoping for the addition of a voice chat to the game. Voice chat communication is very common and useful in team-based games, so players have been asking for it for many years. “Valorant”, “DOTA”, “Rainbow Six Siege”, “CSGO”, “Overwatch”, and “Fortnite” have had voice chat for years. While concerns of unpleasantries still remain, players should at least be given the choice to have voice communications. In fact, many gamers have tried implementing full team voice chat in their games, using links to voice channels in Discord servers, an application meant for gaming. I have joined these voice calls myself and even created some. In my experience, people are much less negative when they are talking to each other through voice as opposed to texting.
Additionally, typing to teammates negatively impacts gameplay, since it’s impossible to play the game and type messages at the same time. Since the game requires fast-paced decisions and intricate team-planning, text chat does not even effectively help collaboration.
If Riot Games really wants to address negative interactions, they need to improve their banning and player-reporting process. Serious actions are rarely taken when players are reported for toxic behavior. More so, the game is known for its bugs and terrible game client, which frustrates players and causes disputes during games. Instead of addressing serious concerns, the decision to remove “/all chat” is yet another example of how the large video game developer is out of touch with its player-base.