Voice chat is back for testing

Voice chat makes a return in Patch 3.0, starting with a test in the Americas, with other regions to follow if everything looks good.

After a few… interesting development issues, we’re bringing back the ability to voice chat with your premade team. We’re rolling out voice chat region-by-region (starting with the Americas in Patch 3.0) to ensure things are sounding good and performing well. If we see more issues, we’ll be taking it back into the lab before going worldwide.

We anticipate that there may be some quality or performance hiccups so we’ll be labeling this as a beta test (I know, a beta within a beta) until we’re confident that everything’s working as intended.

WHAT HAPPENED TO VOICE CHAT?

Many of you have asked what’s been going on, so here’s the quick version:

In Patch 2.4, we switched to a new plugin to power the game’s voice chat. As the patch was released to players back in July, we saw issues with performance; notably mics activating when they shouldn’t, a slew of quality issues, unexpected sound glitches, low volume output, and inability to control input levels. We had to disable it as soon as possible.

The timelines on which we develop Wild Rift means that as a patch is released to players, we’re usually putting the finishing touches on the next one. Given that the next major release wasn’t far away, we didn’t have time to add any feature changes before our Patch 2.5 deadline.

Then, as we were preparing to re-enable voice in Patch 2.6, we found another bug affecting any players who had upgraded to the then-recently-released Android 12. In a lobby, even if you were on mute, your mic was shown as active, when… it actually wasn’t. We thought about releasing with this visual weirdness, but we want you to have absolute trust that we’re not sending your amazing voices into the world when you don’t want to. Despite the fact that the issue was purely visual, we held off until we could pin down and fix that nasty glitch.

So! Starting in Patch 3.0, we’re bringing back voice chat in the Americas, with other regions to follow. It’ll be a minimum of two weeks in the Americas only as we monitor and check your feedback, and if we see any significant quality or performance problems, we’ll change the plan as needed.

Thanks for sticking with us, and have fun chatting again soon!