VALORANT is going through a voice chat crisis, and it’s complete chaos

If you have been struggling to hear your VALORANT teammates’ comms since the start of Act Two, well, you aren’t alone. While Riot Games has (finally) acknowledged the presence of a glitch affecting the voice chat functionality, it’s yet to be fixed and is wreaking havoc in our games. 

In almost every other VALORANT game I play these days, I can’t hear my party members or teammates while they can, or they can’t hear me while I can. Sometimes, the glitch is restricted to my party alone, where my party members can’t hear me, but I can hear them and teammates who aren’t in my party.

As far as I can recall, the bug was first spotted after Patch 8.04. At that time, it affected five-stack parties only, so we’d just have to hop onto Discord to fix it. Unfortunately, the bug is now more prevalent than ever, and it’s affecting all kinds of parties.

Crucially, Riot issued a notification on March 29, stating that it is aware of the problem and is working on a fix. But it’s been three days, and things are only getting worse. Interestingly, according to the official server status page, the issue is restricted to certain servers, including Asia-Pacific and Korea. Servers in EMEA and the Americas have apparently not been affected.

A casual VALORANT player wouldn’t realize how grave the issue is. I have had teammates throw matches in high Elo just because they thought people ignored their calls. Communication is key in tactical shooters like these, especially in advanced lobbies. I never had a longer losing streak like the one I have right now, and I can’t blame my teammates for it anymore. Having a glitch like this is a crisis for us, ranked players, looking to climb the ladder, which isn’t a breeze of an experience anyway. 

If you are reading this and have had a similar experience, I have a small workaround for you to try. Press the Esc key, go to Audio, and then the Voice Chat tab. Here, find the Team and Party Voice Chat options and enable and disable them multiple times. It may fix things but don’t get too excited. It doesn’t work in most cases.