I know this is kind of a hot topic for a lot of players but I honestly don’t see why being in team voice chat isn’t a mandatory thing for competitive games. If you’re queuing comp (a game mode where you’re meant to take things a bit more serious and try to work together as a team and win) it should automatically place you in team voice, if someone really wants to not hear any other player during the game startup they should have to go in and manually mute each of their teammates or at the very least open the menu and click leave team voice. (Yes I know this is annoying but it should act as a deterrence for people who just refuse to communicate or work with their team while in the competitive setting.)
Not having your team able to hear call outs such as asking for swaps, healing, target locations, ect is a serious handicap. While voice communication is not required to win it is still nice to have. Similar to how it is nice having all 6 of your teammates in game, yes it’s completely winnable in a 5v6 game but it sure as hell helps having all 6 players. I know there is a lot of toxicity out there and most players who don’t join team voice or leave it are typically doing so to try to avoid toxicity but not being able to listen to your team, communicate with them or simply hear helpful information promotes more toxicity then it stops in my opinion.
This is in no way me trying to poke fun at anyone or force every person in the game to make call outs, shot call, or even talk to their team themselves, if you don’t want to talk in team voice or you don’t have a mic that’s completely fine and acceptable. I completely respect those who don’t wish to speak, but at least being able to hear your team in a team based game makes a world of difference and can help you win a lot more games.
I’ve made this post not as an attempt to be toxic or hateful towards anyone but to hopefully help make competitive a bit less of a stressful place for everyone. I’ve had more than a handful of games where I’ve made a call out for my healer that there is a flanker such as McCree behind, only to watch them get helplessly flash banged and killed moments later due to them not hearing the call out because they weren’t in team voice. It’s frustrating to say the least, and you can’t really sit there and type out that kind information in any reasonable time.
i appreciate your approach. i think a lot of people on the forums need to calm down, but you’ve made a reasoned, rational post.
to answer your question - no, there is no way to make team chat mandatory for any mode, because there’s no way to reliably detect whether or not a player is in chat. even if all of the hardware reported to the operating system its activity, you could still redirect voip traffic to a “black hole”. this is easily do-able on pc or console.
even if blizzard could reliably detect it, i like to believe they wouldn’t because they used to care about free agency - and even if they don’t any more, teammates who don’t join chat are still playing at your level, whether you believe voice comms to be an advantage or not.
for me, personally, and at my bracket (platinum), i find most voice comms to be some combination of irrelevant, annoying, bad, or simply wrong. i objectively play better and win more games when i focus on myself and am able to listen for sound cues instead of having to try to ignore irrelevant chatter.
if people started talking about the next fight instead of screaming things like “omg i just died” “healers do something” “dps do something” “tanks do something” then i’d reconsider joining - but from my own experience that doesn’t happen until mid diamond or so.
Harassment, Mute, Deaf, avoiding the person who just blars music, the people who play drunk/high, listening to voice chat can cause less focus on the actual game, and those who talk about unrelated things.
There are many reasons to not be in voice chat. Making it mandatory can be discriminatory.
Because people blow and burp into the mic, tell you to uninstall rather than actually convey enemy positiong or any other important information
from my experience also a lot of people think that insulting your own team makes them win, and some of these people tend to do it after the game ends which is a mindboggline next-level oldschool Dad strat
Yes there are people who make voice chat hard to be in, but you can just block or mute those specific players. Most of the time (Not all the time however) it is only one person who is hard to listen to, but why just avoid voice chat entirely and put your team at a disadvantage when there are mechanics in place to avoid those toxic players?
Use the mute button that’s what it is there for. I don’t condone bullying but I also don’t condone players intentionally not trying to work together with the players trying to communicate.
I have been playing games fps category since 2005. Obviously during the worse era of trash talk and insults in gaming. I have grown thick skin and am 29 years old. Nothing some random person on the internet could possibly say would bother me. For the people who need a safe space. I get that too, but you are always disadvantaging your team by not using the mute button for the less than ideal players who talk.
I’ve spent the last 3 years in comms, been in and out of voice, muting, ignoring, arguing, and honestly just straight up leaving voice chat has been the best decision I’ve made in the game.
Also, as also a 29 year old, playing my first online shooter (Delta Force) when I was like 5, and grown up playing FPS also, I have seen and heard it all. But life gives out free anxiety. We all take to things differently. But back then I didn’t have Arabs telling me they’re going to “r*** me and my family” and all sorts.
No thanks. Done with that.
It would be a waste of 15 seconds of hero pick time to go in and mute everyone because I don’t want to hear people’s voices. I don’t join voice chat now because the sound of someone’s voice - particularly when they’re being aggressive - triggers me and throws off my game completely. I’d rather not have that forced on me and have the extra step every game of switching everyone off so I can just listen to the characters, the sound effects (surprisingly useful when you’re a support trying to avoid tracer and reaper) and the rest of the game.
In short, it would be a terrible idea and you’d find more people would be against it than for it. The toxicity in this game is bad enough, and I don’t believe they record voice chat, so you’d just be inviting more toxicity.
People who are listing all the bad that comes out of voice chat are ignoring the fact that there is a mute button in their argument.
So the better question would be why leave voice vs muting?
Funny thing, when my callouts aren’t heard, or when I didn’t manage to communicate a play and the support that isn’t in voice ults at the same time as the second support (cuz they are not communicating) and etc. - I insta get triggered and it throws me off during game.
Yeah, if the game isn’t going well and I notice half the team or someone aint in vc I’m instantly demoralized (I play in high plat-low diamond, if it was gold or below I wouldn’t care too much, but in diamond - I’m pissed)
Just flat out leaving voice without giving it a chance first is a lose-lose situation. I respect that some people don’t wanna go near it - I can’t change them and order them what to do, but it saddens me that we are having these kind of discussions instead of how to deal/counter/solve toxicity in voice comms - which is a far more valuable and an educational discussion to be had.
The other sad part is that people who bash voice comms have maybe used them twice and never again. So they have very little experience with it and are completely throwing that aspect of game-sense/skill out the window
Blizzard doesn’t have the server space to be able to save every game’s voice comms then listen to it for reporting. Think of a few kilobytes for text for every game versus upwards of 50MB per game, potentially per player, for voice chat with thousands of games going on at the same time, plus the rest of what’s required for handling the game, plus more people to handle the reporting functions to listen to the voice chat.
So unless you can offer an alternative to storage space to save all those voice chats and the potential complicated nature of attributing to each and every voice file the requisite metadata to be able to link it to the game, the player and timestamping it all so it interleaves with the other voice files for the game since they would need to save each person’s contribution individually for identification purposes…then there is no real discussion to be had around “how to deal/counter/solve toxicity in voice comms” other than muting or leaving. That’s all that we as players can do and asking Blizzard to outlay even more money around policing voice comms for no benefit to them is not reasonable or feasible.
So I don’t log into voice chat. I’ve chosen not to participate in that aspect of the game after multiple seasons of trying. The last straw was being told “don’t you dare talk back to me, b****”. I don’t need that toxicity in my life.
I have a Z key, I have an X key. I listen to the callouts of the characters which can be surprisingly helpful. It’s not perfect and yes, it likely hampers my progress up the ladder, but I value my mental health over any of callouts and toxicity in voice comms.
I meant this more from the aspect of the players themsleves. For example: if someone starts to be toxic or starts to flame - me and my duo mate start making jokes to alleviate the situation and chill our party - if it doesn’t work we can always mute… How to develop your mentality when met with toxicity so it doesn’t affect you… stuff like that.
In complete honestly - online games have given me a thicker skin, taught me how to communicate more effectivly not just in game but in life too, what works and what doesn’t. How to always use the word “we” when complaining instead of naming the person… Trust me there are a million discussions to be had on that topic.
It’s like bullies at school - you won’t stop them from existing, but you can learn how to deal with them vs “changing school/not going to it”
Same with adult life - you gotta learn how to deal with people and how to keep a cool head - it’s a valuable skill to have and develop.
I’m not forcing anyone I’m just throwing it out there…
Like I understand that some people don’t got time for that due to their lives or whatnot…
You’re not going to get the players as a community to do it, and you need a buy in from every single person, and you’re not going to get that from every single trolling brat who thinks it’s funny to be toxic.
One of the things about adult life is you can also choose your battles and what you will and will not deal with. I don’t think I should need to “develop my mentality when met with toxicity”, nor should anyone. It should just be patently unacceptable but unfortunately, we’re talking about the lowest common denominator when discussing large groups of people. I’m not about to put myself in a position where I have to potentially listen to it in order to start the process of “alleviating the situation and chill our party”.
You’ve chosen to use voice comms and it’s worked for you when it’s been effective in your games. My experience when I’ve chosen to use voice comms has been far more negative than positive, and that’s even when I haven’t spoken to reveal the fact that I’m female.
At this point, we’ll have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.
This is exactly how adult life doesn’t work. With all do respect. Adults have to deal with bosses, banks, family, co-workers, clients etc etc. They are either good at dealing with people or they aren’t.
A doctor doesn’t get to pick and choose his patients. A politician doesn’t get to pick and choose his people or other world leaders. A parent doesn’t get to choose his childrens classmates and their parents… You don’t get to choose who you deal with, but you get to choose how you deal with them.
And you’re making an assumption that I’m not an adult, with a full time paying job, a university degree, a family and a mortgage. I choose my battles and what I will and will not deal with, and it’s been very successful for me so far.
If that’s not your experience, then I don’t know what to tell you.