For some reason I am unable to use match chat and I’ve tried all of the solutions I’ve seen for similar posts with no luck. There’s a little muted symbol next to my name when you go to social and look at groups. There is no notification of a chat suspension when I open overwatch and I can still use normal text chat. I checked the overwatch.log folder an theres a couple error codes I’ll paste below.
There are a few things that can prevent voice chat from functioning properly. Let’s try the following to rule out some potential settings conflicts.
Let’s reset the in game user options:
Right click Windows Start
Open File Explorer
Open Documents
Delete the Overwatch folder and empty the Recycle Bin.
(This will deleted any unsaved/saved highlights so if you wish to preserve those, save and then move them from the videos folder before deleting the OW folder.)
The Spring 2018 Creators build of windows added some permission options to allow you greater control over what apps on your system can do. In some cases these permissions are turned off by default even though the option itself might be on. You can turn them on as follows:
Press your Windows key or activate Cortana
Type then select ‘Settings’
Go to ‘Privacy’
Select ‘Microphone’ on left hand side
Toggle ‘Allow apps to access your microphone’ off and back on
Make sure both the recording and playback devices you are using are set to Default Device in windows. You can check this by:
Right clicking on the sound icon on your taskbar
Choosing sound settings and maximizing the windows
Choosing sound control panel
Choosing recording (and then repeat with playback) devices, selecting the device in the list and pressing the set default button below the list.
Once that is done go through and disable every device except the ones we will be using for testing in the client. Click on the device on the list, then right click. Choose Disable.
We will want to disable any enhancements, exclusive modes and volume reduction settings that might be active.
These options are found under the properties of the affected devices. Select the device, click properties and then switch to the Advanced, Enhancement and Communication tabs to make the necessary changes.
Disable Volume reduction:
Hit Windows key and type sound.
Go to the Sound options.
Click the Communications tab.
For the setting “When Windows detects communications activity”, set it to “Do nothing”.
Check the application specific volume settings both within the game options and in windows options to make sure your microphone or headset is not muted for Overwatch. You will need to have overwatch running, tab out, open the volume mixer via the sound icon on your windows taskbar, and scroll to the right through the various volume controls.
heres the link (sorry for late reply ive been busy)
As you can hopefully see there is that muted icon next to my name and clicking it does nothing. I’ve looked through all my setting and everything and it all looks fine.
It looks like you’re playing from a college or university network? Often times we see campus network firewalls block the voice chat connection specifically for Overwatch.
You might want to try connecting through a different network, like a mobile data hotspot or VPN for example, just to see if you can confirm if the voice chat works when not going through the campus network.
If it works through a different internet source then you may try contacting the school’s IT team to see if they can look into the firewall restriction for the voice chat.
I tried using a vpn and it works now so I think you found the issue. Thank you or the help. Hopefully I can figure out a way to get it enabled without being on 100 ping with a vpn lol
Depending on the VPN software you may be able to select the specific datacenter location to directly connect to. First, try connecting to one that is closest to your own location, if that does not help, then try connecting to a host location closest to either Los Angeles (if you live west of the contential divide) or Chicago (if you live east of the contential divide). By deliberately selecting the host datacenter location for your VPN to somewhere that is going to be more optimized to reach Overwatch’s North American datacenter locations, there is a chance to reduce the latency.
You can talk with the network admin/tech support on-site and ask if they can open the ports required for voice chat. They may need to communicate with Blizzard about it.