As I hyper-casual gamer now, I also like that I can drop into any of the servers I've joined and those communities still know who I am. I maybe play 10 games of Dota a year, and I'm still on first name terms with the people I play with. Disord is just hands down the unifying glue that brings together any type of gaming community, it attacked the problem by always offering a better experience to alternatives, and providing tight integration to the platforms that helped it grow. Every single game chat voice just sucks compared to Discord.
Back in 2006, I used to run a game server hosting company, approximately 400~ game servers at the peak excluding voice (battlefield, css, gmod). I hosted Teamspeak and Ventrillo, and they were nice 0.25 "per slot" servers per month, but the process was so cumbersome.
>every single game voice chat just sucks compared to discord
I disagree wholeheartedly. Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb. The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
Discord has "good enough" voice audio quality and infinitely easier on-boarding and usage compared to Mumble. Most users, especially gamers who often have higher-spec machines then normal users, don't care about RAM usage.
Plus there's an underappreciated aspect of having really good text channels tied in with the servers, meaning people have a reason to be looking at the server and who's on voice outside of active calls/voice channels.
(EDIT: Forgot to add, server downtime seems to be a regional thing. I'm unfortunately on Discord almost every night; there's occasional degraded periods but otherwise I can normally assume it just works.)
I'm not arguing that the features/ease of use is the reason why its doing well. All of those features are unmatched for average consumers that don't care about their privacy which is their customer/product base. I didn't say anything about the features you mentioned and was talking about voice chat only.
>Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage.
Source?
Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
Quick, ad-hoc voice chat with minimal hassle is one of the most important features of gaming voice chat. A big reason discord is more successful than other solutions in the space is that they recognized this. You can try to define 'voice chat' down to something mumble is good at but it doesn't end up being a very interesting way to compare things.
A key feature that I never see discord having is nested subchannels with whisper/shout. I play a game where we will have thousands of players in the same shard and need people to be able to communicate with each other in subchannels while still being able to hear and speak up to the entire channel. We did switch from Jabber to Discord for paging purposes though.
Personally I hate running Discord because my computer already has trouble running 8 game clients, but I see the value in its appeal to the mass market. Personally I prefer the days when every friend group had a ventrilo server, and if not you'd use Skype (before it got ruined) for those adhoc meetups.
I think in many ways discord hits it's peak when it can separate easily into multiple voice channels each with about 4-10 people each. I really like nested voice channels (like Mumbles linked channels) but really they don't show their benefits until you're deep into more complicated stuff (raids/etc) then the average person hits.
I think discords biggest (gaming-related) pull is that it's so simple to onboard someone. Once you get someone through the "two clicks" of on-boarding, it's much easier to get the them to say, especially since it's cross platform.
That's a 'key feature' for a rather narrow niche of players. Which makes a lot of sense - voice chat itself was once a special thing for srscat gaming enthusiasts. The trouble is, the voice chat products themselves got stuck there, even as networking, median hardware and multiplayer gaming itself got a lot more popular. Discord is just a better product, not for 'the mass market' but generally and it's worth studying rather than dismissing its success especially if you want better voice chat tools that also meet your specialized needs.
That's fair, there is a distinction between the actual process of using voice chat versus the specifications of the voice chat. It seems that I took OP as referring to the former, while you're referring to the latter.
> Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
None but anecdotal, much like this.
> I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy.
Right, you're arguing that it sucks because of those points are I argued back that the ease-of-us, UI, and "good-enough" quality are why Discord doesn't suck (or sucks less if you prefer) then the alternatives.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
I've never heard of that and find it strange considering you don't even have to set a password for user accounts as someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments. Sounds like a per-server setting
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
Some servers can opt into extreme "are you a human?" validation and SMS verification is a good, universal signal of that. It helps prevent botting, alt accounts (frequent reuse of that number shouldn't be possible IIRC), and ban evasion.
Also, if Discord itself notices weird activity coming from your account that looks like a selfbot (a program pretending to be the client via Discord's private API) or automation, it can pop up that verification flow. I'm guessing extremely abusive shared IPs can also trigger this.
But AFAIK you don't have to attach your phone number to continue. (I don't remember if it only suggests to link your phone for 2FA or that it auto-links and you can remove phone 2FA afterwards) Discord have outright denied selling or forwarding your info, and they don't show or plan to show ads. In that case, what's the issue with one-time phone verification in some cases?
Negative, if you get their triggered anti spam response for creating an account fresh, or even logging into an existing account, you literally cannot log into that account anymore without providing a nonvoip phone number. You have to attach a phone number to continue.
What's the issue? Maybe the user doesn't have a phone number to give. Maybe the user already has that phone number attached to another account. Maybe they don't want to attach their phone number to a huge set of data, depending on their use, if indeed discord sells or begins to sell it. Rhetorical question if you ask me.
250mb for a singleton app is not that big of a deal these days. Most browser tabs use more memory than that these days (which really does make me mad).
I've always been surprised when anyone complains about Discord's audio quality.
Discord sounds beautiful to me. Everyone sounds crystal clear. If you're experiencing poor quality, then it's almost 100% on the speaker's end. They either need a better microphone or a less noisy environment.
Discords voice quality is definitely better then you would expect, but going between a properly set up Mumble server and normal discord voice always shows a bit of a difference to me.
For me and my friends the audio quality is fine, but the latency just kills it. There's like 150-200ms of delay (just guessing based on how it feels, haven't timed it properly). It's as bad as Skype in our testing.
It's probably fine if that's what you got used to, but going from low latency to higher latency is so jarring that I can't see us ever moving from mumble as long as it's still supported.
> Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb.
250mb is irrelevant on any system you'd want to game on.
> The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
My real-world experience is that mumble servers go down more often and for longer - you're usually at the mercy of an individual hobby sysadmin. In theory Discord's uptime is pretty bad, but in practice it actually does beat the alternatives.
There is a part of me that agrees, wholeheartedly, but then there is the other part of me that opted for 64GB of RAM in my gaming desktop because it was trivial in the overall cost of the system.
I play league and CSGO on my 8gb laptop, but the Discord desktop client was superb glitchy for me. I don’t know if it was ram or what, but it was unusable.
Back in 2006, I used to run a game server hosting company, approximately 400~ game servers at the peak excluding voice (battlefield, css, gmod). I hosted Teamspeak and Ventrillo, and they were nice 0.25 "per slot" servers per month, but the process was so cumbersome.