[freeflight]

Even nearly 20 years ago I was hanging out daily on voice chat servers with my Counter-Strike buddies.

It wasn't just for coordination in-game, just hanging out and talking while sometimes not even playing, because that's what even male friends do: They talk.

It's even more dominant with consoles where since the 360/PS3 era voice has also seen quite high adoption rates even more common than in PC gaming.

Then there's Discord which is very much the millennial version of "hanging out in IRC all day" culture combining text and voice chat.

[JakeTheAndroid]

Firstly, you're talking about CS which is one of few games where voice chat is more of the norm. Whats funny is that I still to this day get stuck in pugs with half the team not having mics. For console games like COD, most causal games I played few people had mics. But what we are talking about is competitive games more or less which does generally get more attention than Viva Piñata or something like that. And, if you look at something like LoL or Dota2 voice chat is either non-existent or no one uses it. I have ran into so few people using their mics in Dota2 and that is a competitive game. Instead people ping or type in chat.

When I played MMORPGs, which I think we can all agree are pretty popular, very few people had mics. For WoW people would connect to Vent but most didn't have a mic. It was useful for raids, but most of the time communication was via text chat. When playing MapleStory I would sit on Vent with my friends who often played on entirely different servers and no one on that game actually used Vent or TS regularly as part of their daily grind, it was almost exclusively chat.

So, I think the assertion that voice chat is a minority is probably correct. And like you said Discord is beyond a voice chat for gaming. I am in plenty of Discord channels and I have never once entered into a voice chat with anyone. It's a community chat room that happens to offer a voice chat option. Plenty of people use voice chat while gaming, but I don't think it's by and large the majority.

[freeflight]

> Firstly, you're talking about CS which is one of few games where voice chat is more of the norm.

For close to 20 years, as such, it's hardly something new. That's just how communities organized back then: Around clans and servers.

Matchmaking killed a lot of that, but the clan structure helps retain some of it. That's something a whole lot of people, particularly younger ones, participate to this day without ever fully going "pro" because there's a pretty massive middle ground between "absolutely casual gaming" and "sponsored organized pro gaming".

> For console games like COD, most causal games I played few people had mics.

Did you actually play with friends? There's a reason "party chat" features like Xbox Live Party were heavily demanded for many years.

> When I played MMORPGs, which I think we can all agree are pretty popular, very few people had mics. For WoW people would connect to Vent but most didn't have a mic.

That's completely opposite to my experience in vanilla Wow: Organizing and managing 40 man raids without voice chat was pretty much impossible.

Just like daily guild live mostly happened on a voice chat server, where people would hang out even when they were not playing.

> So, I think the assertion that voice chat is a minority is probably correct. And like you said Discord is beyond a voice chat for gaming.

If you define voice chat as solely "voice chat interactions with randoms in public rounds" then maybe yes, but your mileage will vary vastly depending on the platform and genre.

Discord also isn't "beyond a voice chat for gaming", it's pretty much just the modern manifestation of server centered communities like they used to be a thing with CS game servers and still are a thing to this day with "Clan TS2 servers", Discord is just a natural evolution of those where people don't have to pay rent/bandwidth for a server.

[JakeTheAndroid]

> For close to 20 years, as such, it's hardly something new. That's just how communities organized back then: Around clans and servers.

CS is not new, but it's one game. And even within this one game, many people do not have mics. Most people don't play exclusively with pre-mades they play pugs. Either via MM or Faceit (and to a lesser extent these days, ESEA). If you pug you'll find most people don't use mics at all.

> Matchmaking killed a lot of that, but the clan structure helps retain some of it. That's something a whole lot of people, particularly younger ones, participate to this day without ever fully going "pro" because there's a pretty massive middle ground between "absolutely casual gaming" and "sponsored organized pro gaming".

Most people don't play in clans or pre-mades like I said before. Yes, the move visible players do use voice chat, and at the highest levels it's uncommon for people to not use it. But a bulk of players in CS do not fall into these categories whatsoever. The average ranking is Gold Nova-ish which is far from the top end of the player base.

> Did you actually play with friends? There's a reason "party chat" features like Xbox Live Party were heavily demanded for many years.

Yes, I played in a clan starting in MW2 - BO2 or MW3 (I forget which came out last) and plenty of my clan members didn't have mics during clan events, let alone just playing random games. This was on Playstation Network, so maybe Xbox players used this way more, I can't speak to that.

> That's completely opposite to my experience in vanilla Wow: Organizing and managing 40 man raids without voice chat was pretty much impossible.

I guess this depends on how dedicated your groups were. We had 40 people in voice chat, but really only the party leaders regularly had mics in Vent or TS. This was enough to organize and successfully raid. But I guess YMMV here. All other MMOs I've played voice chat was essentially non-existent and you chatted with random people more often anyways since you didn't need pre-made parties or your guild to do most of the events. Using MapleStory (since I played the shit out of that) Party Quests were almost always just randoms in channel 1 not your friends. This echos the experiences I had playing Eve and Rift when that came out.

> Discord also isn't "beyond a voice chat for gaming", it's pretty much just the modern manifestation of server centered communities like they used to be a thing with CS game servers and still are a thing to this day with "Clan TS2 servers", Discord is just a natural evolution of those where people don't have to pay rent/bandwidth for a server.

Discord isn't used exclusively for in game chat in my experience. I'm part of plenty of communities on discord that have nothing to do with gaming, and even the gaming communities don't focus around chatting while gaming. They are usually to keep up with whatever the community is focused on, be it a streamers Discord or whatever. I'm not saying that Discord isn't used similar to TS or Ventrilo but it's beyond what those services did, and they aren't dedicated to just voice chatting with your group. It's a far more versatile service.