Something that’s been on my mind since shortly after voice chat was introduced (very late) into the game.
I think two things played against it.
Not being available for several years of the games life hurt the function. As players were used to not speaking to each other. And most humans being irrationally resistant to change means almost everyone went on not talking to each other after it was made available (Despite the fact that they had asked for it themselves over and over)
Voice chat being off by default means even new players will not use it more often than not. Because people are lazy and generally just leave things as they are.
I ́m now thinking that it might improve things if voice chat was on by default instead of off.
Nah, every single game I have ever played that has it enabled by default, starting with Counter Strike: Source, I end up disabling it after a few short matches.
Exhibit A: The player that comes on cussing up a storm purely because they have a mic. Yay, now I can get trolled by another means.
Exhibit B: The player that doesn’t know they have a mic on and have trash music or other noises going on in the background.
And finally exhibit C: My computer doesn’t have a mic.
Besides that, the only players I want to hear are the 3 and 4 mans I got teamed up with, and they’re already on Discord, so I can’t join their voice chat easily anyway.
Not everyone has a mic. And not everyone who has a mic is worth listening to. I mean “irrationally resistant to change” could describe a certain OP. I would do almost anything else than try to endlessly argue on voice with someone who spewed something like, “but actually, it was a good idea to abandon you guys in the team fight because we needed the soak”.
The weirdly cool thing about this game is outside of high-level premade vs premade matches, you really don’t need voice chat. Pings work surprisingly well and combat has an intuitive nature to it. Coming from someone who used to play in pretty high level WOW Arena which needed voice chat, I found HOTS so refreshing.
I remember once on the forums, someone complained when they were on Tyrande that their team didn’t target their marked target. And that’s a skill issue. Just mark the target that people are going to target already because it makes sense. Why use mark in situations when there would be confusion? Do you need voice to follow up your stun with the tank’s CC because it’s easy or do you need to be told to do it? You mark a target that is often CC’d within in range of most of your teammates. Voice gives some people a comfortability to just constantly ramble the most useless information.
I used in-game voice for a while when it was released, and I can’t honestly say I miss the sewage that gets exposed when a group of anonymous males suddenly realize their tank is female. If you want even fewer women to play cooperative video games, by all means have their gender instantly exposed when joining a match because they weren’t warned they would have a live mic by default.
Maybe it’s a teamfight, you’re getting dived, and you mark the lowest hp enemy, which also happens to be a squishy high damage hero. But your allies are too busy targeting the tank (which they won’t kill either).
A better argument would be… why would anyone expect telling a HOTS player what to do to work? If it doesn’t work in text, it probably won’t work in voice.
You took the words right out of my mouth. This game has a significant female population, and they deserve a safe space.
Anyway, why would anyone want to hear their teammates breath, chew, talk on the phone, while playing the game? People are multitasking while playing HOTS so often…I started doing it too! And it’s fun.
One of Tyrande’s strength is being an antidive hero. You actually want people to overextend to get to you (as long as it’s not like group dive). You can try, but it will generally not go well for you. If an assassin is willing to get past your front line, almost by default, unless your positioning is super weird, that becomes the easiest target to attack and collapse on. Stun, then mark, and it should become very clear to kill the target. If your team doesn’t, that’s a matter of allies not peeling, which will be bad regardless if you marked the assassin or not. You should also generally see your teammates converge to protect you before you mark.
You shouldn’t need voice to tell you to protect your ally which is easier to get to than their tank in a game that has isomorphic top down view, that’s a skill issue.