I think hearing other players' music would be even worse than hearing them talk.

Reverb wrote: »

Arcturus wrote: »

People who are shy or don't seem to be able to press an opt out button will say no.

I’m not shy at all, and have no problem managing optional features. I say no for the following reasons:

1) I don’t want dev time to be spent on pc voicecomm. None. There are many options for pc players who want that.

2) I Don’t want any of the Help Desk or Tier 2 support time spent dealing with tickets about PC client voicecomm.

3) I don’t want one second of the testing team’s time spent doing integration or regression testing on voicecomm functionality for updates.

4) I don’t want the support staff wasting time writing up an FAQ or knowledge article telling people to check their sound card settings and drivers, only to have them be ignored, and instead see any forum posts complaining that voicecomm is not working right, making bill ask “have you checked your game menu settings? what sound card do you have? Have you tried updating your driver? Here’s a link to a troubleshooting guide”

5) listing twice because it’s really important that no dev time be spent on this.

As far as I know (which is little) game voice chats are a hired service not something devs have to deal with themselves.

I tried voice chat in another game I played for a brief amount of time. First time there was a player commenting on every little thing he did in game with a lot of yelling and cursing. I was questing in the area so ended up shutting chat off. Even the most easy death was followed by an excited "<curse> yeah".

2nd time a couple of players decided we should know just exactly what poor taste they had in music.

festegios wrote: »

You just end up with people breathing heavily down the mic in zone chat or listening to someone’s wife yell at thier kids in a different language in the background. - from a console player

LOL!

I'm glad I don't play on console.

I would likely be blasting Ram Ranch or some based German music and then get banned.

As a sufferer of Misophonia, When I played on Console I could only manage a few minutes before never going back in the voice chat, people shouting, background noises / music / kids crying / people arguing. Worst of all people thinking they want others to hear them eat.
I would rather the devs spend time fixing the game than implement something that will always be secondary to discord.

NeuroticPixels wrote: »

I’ve never played ESO on console, so I don’t know exactly how voice chat works there. So I’m not really comparing a potential (hypothetical) PC voice chat to console’s current iteration of voice chat.

But I’d like to know…
If PC had a zone-wide or proximity voice chat, would you use it?

I think it could be very entertaining. It would definitely have to allow a keybind for instant muting. You know there will be trolls and other hooligans. lol. And of course, an option to fully disable it for anyone not interested.

Before the nay-sayers and Negative Nancys perk up and use this as an opportunity to spout their stance on ESO developers not “wasting” time/effort/focus, etc, let’s pretend ESO devs have all the time, manpower, and money in the world and that implementing such a feature wouldn’t be a big deal, nor would it hinder them or us from making ESO awesome.

So, a zone or proximity voice chat? Would you use either? Do you think you’d like it? Or would you always have it disabled?

I would run it disabled the same as I did when I played FO 76.

In-game voice chat would definitely get used by me (for daily groups and dungeon runs) because it would be easier than setting up and getting people to use a Discord chat server, but proximity or zone chat would most likely not get used by me.

Arcturus wrote: »

People who are shy or don't seem to be able to press an opt out button will say no.

I wouldn't use it, ever, not even at the request of other players. It has nothing to do with being shy, and everything to do with not wanting to listen to what amounts to noise pollution when I could be listening to the ambient sounds of the game I'm playing instead. I don't play games to listen to other people mouth off.

Being shy and wanting privacy are two different things. Most PC players who just want to enjoy the world of ESO do not want their privacy impinged upon by other peoples random and unwelcome rudeness (sounds of eating, sounds of children crying, sounds of arguing) and would not use this function simply because there are better ways to have an actual, private conversation with people you value. If people use discord, they don't have to worry about someone snarfing down doritoes into their mic while they cuss out every mudcrab that dares to cross their path.

For clarification, I am also not ok with it even existing on PC. For one thing, the resources of the dev team could be put to far better use fixing other aspects of the game, especially when we already have solutions to voice chat via discord. For another, many players simply do not want to be bothered by others to hop into voice chat for the simplest little things. "Discord required" for the smallest reasons is already bothersome enough. Social pressure to use coms would only increase with an in game means to push players who do not want to use voice chat to do so, and that's something we simply do not need.

It's not about shyness. It's about stating "I draw my line here, and you, stranger on the internet, are not going to cross it, and I will not be bullied into allowing you to." That isn't shy. Its having boundaries. The word "No" should be respected.

I use discord when it is reasonable to, and the situation calls for it. But I respect that there are those who are shy, or who have social anxiety, who cannot, and for them, I am 100% willing to use my fingers to type as I have done in games for the last several decades.

If they have all the time, manpower, and money in the world, then I'd campaign for them to remove it.