Guild Wars 2

Ok look, there are two different types of gamers in our modern era and they really can be divided in to these two groups:

1. ~ People who like to play with extreme focus on TS3. Quite often these are the early 20 year old or younger gamers who grew up with headsets on XBOX and are accustomed to this type of grouping and have absolutely no problem devoting 110% focus to whatever guild activity is happening at the time. They are comfortable and adept with this type of communication in a game. In fact, they see games without voice chat as cave-man era, unreasonable and boring.

1. ~ Gamers who are 30+ that grew up with the original NES and when they were around 12-13 years old, Diablo 1, Everquest and Ultima Online were kicking kitten “all text based communication”. They grew up with a certain atmosphere of ambiguity while playing the original MMORPGs “people not knowing who they really were” and most of these older gamers like to maintain that. Believe me when I say, I have had to drag people kicking & screaming just to have them give voice chat a chance.

The point being is that Arena-Net has created an environment that is uncomfortable in SPvP for the 30+ gamers who do not care for voice chat communication. It drives this type of gamer away from the game and only further dimishes the PvP community. This is mostly due to merging solo and team ques. It is a gross error for a few reasons:

• Primarily – SPvP in GW2 with the merging of solo & team ques now requires that you play with a good & strong 5 man premade “that is using voice chat” or you ultimately will not succeed. Any of you who argue this have clearly not played against higher MMRs. So what are we looking at? It’s a game that requires a sense of politics, social function, charisma and tolerance of your team mates to succeed “which is great! I love it actually!” but there is no longer a place for the guy with great combat reflexes who just wants to listen to mp3s while he PvPs. If there were a place, we’d have a lot more players
• Many 30+ hardcore gamers “including the large majority of the original Guild Wars 1 PvP fan base” do not want to play a game that requires voice chat to get serious and they will find other games that do not require voice to be able to hang in the high teirs. Having “Random Arena” and “Team Arena” was the correct approach in Guild Wars 1. I’m sure all of you Devs absolutely hate hearing the Guild Wars 1 references but this is a serious point that you need to pay attention to. You are missing out on a large fan-base of old gamers who wanted to love Guild Wars 2 until they found out there was no longer a place for them in the new competitive scene vs. 5 man premades on TS3.
• The active voice chat players ~ Some of us are on voice chat every single night leading teams and cooperating but let me tell ya, it’s stressing and difficult to deal with each and every night. I mean seriously, sometimes you just want to set yourself to offline and watch a movie in the background while NOT having to talk to other people on a voice chat but this is impractical and unreasonable with the current merge of solo & team + the funked up MMR algorithm. So what are we looking at again? A game that demands 5 man premade voice chat play if you want reasonable and practical match results. This does indeed push players away from the game. I see more players in Guild Wars 2 tell me “I need a break” and then never come back, than any other MMORPG I have ever seen and it is due to above reasons that I have listed. You should take this seriously coming from someone who has played all of the major MMORPGs of our time.

The game needs a casual competitive scene again

Suggestions:

• Bring back solo que
• Add 1v1 arenas with rankings “not hard to do”
• Add strange competitive PvE challenges with rankings “like old GW1 mission scores”
• In general ~ make more game modes that do not reward multi man communication through voice chats. Everyone loves team play! but not everyone wants to be on a voice chat.

Remember that there are many people who play only for the purpose of being competitive, no matter what game mode it is but not all of them want to use voice chat. By making ALL of your game modes reward voice chat, you are losing the interest of these competitive players simply because they cannot be competitive without it. Guild Wars 2 is becoming widely recognized as a voice chat MMORPG. This reputation in itself drives away older gamers who do not care for voice chats.

And for crying out loud, give us some competitive game modes that don’t require the TS politics. Boy oh boy would that be great. #1 suggestion for this game in my opinion.

I’m the 30+ gamer that hates voice chat. I don’t want to hear squeaky teen voices trying to tell me what to do.

it’s a team game, so you need communication. voice is faster than text, and doesn’t use the fingers you need to play. VOIP will always be necessary for competitive team games. it’s pure logic.

i’m 21 and the people i play with vary from 15 – 50+, but most of them are in their 20s. i don’t have too much time for kids, but the few i know on TS are pretty chill. don’t hate on strangers you never met.

i play solo with music also, but i’m not going to try kid myself that it’s competitive. no communication in a team game is always going to be worse.

27yo here.

I’d love voice-chat to be implemented in the first place.
Ts3 / Raidcall are external programs, and while they’re good, it’s impossible to get a grab on pugs with them (at least not in PvP).

I dislike the 1v1 arena idea, since builds tend to hard-counter each other in Gw2. So it wouldn’t make sense to design a game-mode that determines who’s winning by the classes they’re putting against each other.

Bringing back solo-Q is totally enough to deal with the listed problems, but to really improve Gw2, VoIP functionality must be implemented. And if you don’t like it / run into screamers too often: just turn it off. even if your team then rages at you, you also can turn off map/team/say-chat and enjoy your soundtrack.

Just for the record: many players in my guilds are well beyond 30yo and it’s actually the older players who are constantly sitting and chilling on TS, while the younger ones must be dragged to the TS.

I guess we both have a way too small sample-size to make a representative assumption when our observations & estimations differ that drastically. Still, the only people I see disappear for quite some time are actually the younger ones, who completely stop playing during exams and what not, while the elder gamers are usually the ones that know their limits and learned to not exceed them (and like to tell everybody else about it, even if they don’t like to hear it^^).
And ofc, reasons for leaving Gw2 permanently are as varied as real-life itself, which – in the mind of a sane player – should always be more important than the game.

Instead of voice chat, they should implement a better system for pings, like the one in LoL.

Alt + Click on the screen opens a quick ping wheel, with 4 options. Drag up and release to ping “Need help here”. Down for “Dangerous, Retreat”. Left for “I’m coming”. Right for “Enemy missing”. All ping will have voice with it. Ping can work on either the minimap, or on the screen (which will creat a long right on the player)

This partially eliminates the need of TS3 for casual groups. You can notice that the enemies left their home open, and ping “Enemy missing”. A thief on your team can acknowledge that by pinging a “I’m coming” back on that point.

This is better than forcing everyone to use voice chat. This works for parties in WvW and PvE too.

@ Choovanski
You’re missing the point entirely my friend! There are many gamers who do not want to be on a voice chat but still want to be good at Guild Wars 2! They prefer an older school feel such as RA in GW1. By re-adding Solo que, they won’t need to worry about being beaten by 5 men on a voice chat because they will be against all other solo quers. This will make the solos happy and then the teamers with voice chats can be happy as well while queing team.

@Arantheal
You are also missing the point of this thread! The point of this thread is to promote game modes such as solo que “which does not require voice chat for team play” but is still team play. You also assume that I have a small sample-size representation in my statement but this very untrue indeed! I am not a famous streamer nor am I member of The Abjured but I guarantee you that I have spent just as much time with this community and other online communities, if not much more, than all of them combined. Upon this, let’s not ignore the fact that the reason why people are always mentioning that they want solo que back and why they are always being told “JUST MAKE YOUR OWN TEAM” is because they aren’t using TS and are not playing with TS teams.

On the subject, here is my suggestion for the arena-net team:

• Bring back Solo Que, make it ranked only
• Make Team Que ranked only
• Make hotjoin/practice function exactly like unranked functions now. Leave the team swapping and strange adjustments to custom arenas and their OPs there-off.
• Make small numbers appear above nodes to represent the number reds and the number of blues on point at those nodes. This would help players who are not on TS, with their ability to judge proper rotations and keep up with 5 man TS teams.

~ Sunshine also had excellent suggestions

uhohhotdog.3598:

I’m the 30+ gamer that hates voice chat. I don’t want to hear squeaky teen voices trying to tell me what to do.

even if i join some random ts3 to play something in gw2 i never ever heard squeaky teen voices. Teens nowdays must be developing nicely. Voice wise.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

@ Choovanski
You’re missing the point entirely my friend!
@Arantheal
You are also missing the point of this thread!

Just to cite you, seems that you miss the point of your own thread.
The point is not to inform everybody that they miss the point (and therefore miss the point entirely), but to discuss the fact that in your (limited) perception of the game there are 2 clear camps of players.
One easily can read that from the topics title.

Further you argued that Gw2 is less popular because it does not have solo-que, while in my (limited) perception it rather suffers from a VoIP solution for all game-modes, especially PvP.
We both presented valid evidence for our claims, still none of us seems to have the authority to speak for the whole community. Hopefully this thread spawns a vivid discussion about the topic at hand, so we all can obtain a more reasonable and broader view on the topic and maybe come up with new ideas about how to promote Gw2, while also answering the initial question:
Are there 2 well defined player-camps that are split precisely by the age of 30?
Stop missing your point, m8.

I am 44 I like you said Started playing on a Vectrex, then atari, intellivision, colecovision, sega, nintendo playstation………..

I love game and still play with my son who’s 24, I will use voice chat NP. Only think is I grew up on Roger Wilco, then Ventrillo. I like Ventrillo the best, I think Team Speak is ok but the issue arises when every other group is a new voice chat!

Ventrillo
Mumble
Raid Call
Team Speak
Razer
Skype
Steam

It gets ridiculous! I have no issue using voice chat, I will listen however I find most players to be Elitists thinking they’re sole purpose is to denigrate anyone who’s not amazing! The community in game is either relaxed lets do something or you suck you’re a noob “Blocked ignore” The do what I say because I am better than you attitude just ruins the entire game.

Difference of opinions in this game is immediate judgement by the player base and its bad.

32 years here. Will…not…voice…chat. I don’t want to talk to or listen to anyone else. Typing is fine though.

I want a game mode where people can’t coordinate over voice.

mmorpg shouldnt be about voice chat ot at least it shouldnt be mandatory i rarely turn on voice chat and just to listen to commander in wvw
i also wonder why they removed solo q
would be better if the game was more skill based than voice chat based?

jihm.2315:

mmorpg shouldnt be about voice chat ot at least it shouldnt be mandatory i rarely turn on voice chat and just to listen to commander in wvw
i also wonder why they removed solo q
would be better if the game was more skill based than voice chat based?

For some reason, people here seem to think that VoIP coordinated team based play is superior to solo play. Does it require more skill? No. It’s just another playstyle – and one which a lot of people don’t like.

This is why earlier, Arenanet used to give higher rewards for TeamQ. They seem to feel that those who team up beforehand deserve more…for what reason I don’t know.

The OP makes no sense.

The older generation gamers grew up with Half-Life voice comm, ventrilo, the old team speak, etc. If you wanted to be competitive in any team game after 2000, you used voice comm.

The only argument you could make is that older generation players are less likely to use public voice comm. But you’re not asking that. You’re making a straw-man for another silly request for solo queue.

I agree and I disagree. The main reason imo that more people don’t get serious about forming teams in this game is that it is not really rewarded enough. Building a team requires a lot of work. You have to find people who you click with personally. That takes a fair amount of trial and error. What is the pay-off exactly? A couple of tournaments a year with cash payments that will go basically to the lebron james teams of the world. It’s not even good enough to be in the top 10% of teams world wide. You have to be the best. I do agree that over 30 gamer does not see VOIP communication as second nature as the younger game however I just think this game doesn’t really reward grouping and doing well outside of winning more. When this game actually rewards doing well at spvp for more then the top handful of players in the world then you’ll get more teams. This game at the minimum should have regular automated tournamets at different skill levels (aka as leagues) that have gem rewards for the top teams. We don’t even have simple things like that.

More in-game communication methods such as pings and commands would be nice. Right now we only have map drawing/pinging and target calling. Communicating on the map is ineffective because you don’t know which teammate is the one putting those marks on your map…and you need to click over to your map to do them, which is just not practical in the middle of a fight.

Target calling in this game is a mess too, you can call 1 target per team, and it gets constantly overwritten by any other ally on the map (could be a fight far away and separate from your current situation). I hate to bring up Gw1 (no I don’t lol), but we had much more complex targeting there. You could call out all of your abilities, who you were using them on, and you could call out all of your enemies/allies abilities as they were using them.

I know plenty of MOBAs have key commands that give basic callouts in a match that help to coordinate.

tldr: Plenty of room to improve.

You may want to check your timelines better, we had voice coms available in GW1 era and we used it. You’re using a false age qualifier for an argument that is simply about very casual vs the more competitive gamers. I’m not a hardcore gamer anymore but I still prefer to use voice coms for any group content, especially for PvP. To me there is no point grouping up in PvP if you’re not going to use voice coms, and I am from the original gamer generation that grew up with the Atari 2600.

@ Dramen

Don’t assume the critic’s position if you are not good at reading an author’s entire post! No one said that there were not voice chats during the GW1 era. What was said is that many older gamers prefer the GW1 RA style play where they don’t “need” to listen to other people’s voices to be able to be good at it. Also, your last statement defines exactly what my statement has stated!

• To me there is no point grouping up in PvP if you’re not going to use voice coms
  I could not have stated this better myself

There have been 13 user responses thus far in this thread. 4 of them have stated that they are users who do not use voice chats. 2 others have made statements about how voice chat is just stressing to use in general and then 2 more others have made statements about how in-game pinging of communication needs advancement vs. voice chat teams. This is over half of the responses thus far.

So it looks like my small sample-size representative assumption is proving itself to be very accurate, after all.

This is probably not the place for this but here are some more suggestions for Anet. (That will never get read)

Add Pauses to tournament games and ranked games. Matches being won and loss based on disconnects and crashes is unacceptable. Any reputable tournament would have some sort of pause mechanism. “Restart match if crash happens in the first minute” is the dumbest most wonky workaround for this. Pauses.

Add replays. If you want tournaments and sPVP to be taken seriously then people should be capable of watching this stuff. People will turn these replays into content. Which turn the game into hype. How does this not exist? You are literally losing possible content every second an sPVP match is being played and not auto recorded.

Allow more spectators than 15. People want to watch tournaments. Facilitate this stuff in game. We shouldn’t have to go to Twitch to watch GW2 content. Gw2 should support spectating en masse IN A MAJOR WAY.

Give SOMETHING to people that spectate sponsored tournaments in game. Create some sort of reward system for people watching sponsored tournaments in the game client. If a team actually kills the ancients – everyone watching get a chest. If a team kills the lord – everyone watching get a chest. If a three cap happens everyone gets reward track exp. Something. Anything. Just reward people for using the game client.

Gem store announcer packs. Give us some variety. Some of us have been playing this game mode for a couple of years now. Some announcer variety would be nice. And people would pay gems for them. What if BLU had an announcer pack. Or NOS. Or Teldo. Or me. Make this stuff.

Sponsor more tournaments. Get in the game Anet. If it’s not your sponsoring an official tournament you should be contacting big name sponsors to run it on their own backed by your brand. These weekly tournaments are great but there needs to be more and they need to be bigger.

Make an official reward system for sponsored tournaments – we shouldn’t be getting Mini Llamas and gems as ‘replacement items’ through the mail. Seriously Anet that’s how you’re sending rewards?

Open up the API so unofficial sites can do interesting things with sPVP specific stats. (maybe they do this and no one is building anything)

Give sPVP players saved builds and gear presets. Part of the reason the meta is so stale is that swapping between builds is a giant PAIN POINT. UX this issue.

Host sPVP streamers – popular or brand new on the official GW2 Twitch account. Do this ALL THE TIME. Never have your stream offline. Put some life into the GW2 Twitch world – 300 viewer during peak is pathetic. Do something about it.

These are suggestions that I think could go a long way towards improving GW2s visibility and the overall quality of life for it’s players.

I’m in my early 20s but my issue is that I have massive social anxiety with voice chat, in part because I never grew up on it because I never played shooters or xbox live stuff. I mean I’ll join it when I can and listen to everyone, but when it comes to talking I have a mini-heart attack each time.

Im 34 years old and it totally depends on my mood if i want to play solo or in ts3. Most of the time i play with guildies, so with ts3 of course. But sometimes i like to play solo, hearing music and stuff so i play alone.

I dont think your age has anything to do with it, and i completly disagree to your GW1 reference. Voice communication has been so much more mandatory for GW1 pvp due to the spikey nature of GW1. No TS meant kick, without any exception. Even the most casual groups used TS. In GW2 instead, you find plenty of groups to join without TS.

I actually view voice communication as cheating. Much like macros. It’s a tool you use outside the game to improve your chances of victory. This isn’t something provided by the game itself.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

So it looks like my small sample-size representative assumption is proving itself to be very accurate, after all.

If that’s how statistics work in your opinion, trying to proof a small sample-size with a even smaller one…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FopyRHHlt3M

Even more ridiculous: you tried to interpret in-depth responses as much in your favor as possible, while the overall content of said responses were quite varied.
You don’t only do this for your ego, do you?

Oxidia.8103:

uhohhotdog.3598:

I’m the 30+ gamer that hates voice chat. I don’t want to hear squeaky teen voices trying to tell me what to do.

even if i join some random ts3 to play something in gw2 i never ever heard squeaky teen voices. Teens nowdays must be developing nicely. Voice wise.

The youngest people I know that play PvP competitively are around 16 to 17 anyway, I’ve never heard of a squeaker or anyone younger than that.

i actually find the opposite most of the adults ive played with prefer to be on ts whereas the try hard kids while are on ts often dont use mics, probably cause their voices sound hilarious :P

67yr old single white male here. Moved out of my moms basement last year. Now living on my own in her attic. I have no problems with teenage voice chat. A huge plus if they wear braces. A bigger plus if theyre in the early teens.

Coz yeah um that just shows they have passion for the game.

@ Mister Fluffkin

I do want to point out again though, about the GW1 reference: That reference was targeted around RA play, which was like what Solo Que used to be. There is a huge audience for this type of casual gaming but GW2 is missing this element. I know that arena-net was not intending for something like TS3 to be mandatory but it just ended up happening that way due to the design of all the game modes.

The reason why Solo Ques are important is because it does not reward voice chat and offers a more casual game mode for those days when you’d rather listen to mp3s than other people talking.

I will have to say, almost the entire PvP community who solo queues is screaming for the return of solo queue.

And rightfully so, its a completely different dynamic to play without a practiced team on Ts3. Heck its a completely different dynamic even if its just a bunch of guildies who got together on Ts3 to play some PvP.

Its just a clear advantage over a team of randoms.

From being a better team comp than what the match making system puts together, to just being able to communicate more effectively.

I have no idea why Anet has not even considered this, because most people are screaming it over and over.

uhohhotdog.3598:

I’m the 30+ gamer that hates voice chat. I don’t want to hear squeaky teen voices trying to tell me what to do.

Agree, solo queue need to return

I am almost 30 and i actually like using TS when doing pvp, i hate typing out stuff … i never have time to do it nor read chat for that matter… voice chat in game wouldn’t bother me – can always turn it off.
I don’t mind conquest either, i think it is fun, what ruins it most of the time is full pug vs full premade which in most cases will never work. That being said your assumptions are wrong.

- i agree, soloq needs to be back
- ranked 1v1 would be bad idea as people will cry for 1v1 balance and 5v5 balance at the same time (see wow and blizzard struggle with balancing game around 3v3 while people cry about BGs and 2v2)… duels anywhere would be nice though~
- honestly i don’t think that voice chat is main reason why premades win:
1) premades usually have better comp (class/build wise) and not ramdom 4 thieves thrown together by matchmaking
2) in premades i was usually in, players were actually pretty good… and we actually did play w/o voice com and still won games
3) pinging actually exists in this game and kind of works as long as people pay attention to map; it would be nice though if it had some sounds like in league

Jomo kenyatta.7351:

i actually find the opposite most of the adults ive played with prefer to be on ts whereas the try hard kids while are on ts often dont use mics, probably cause their voices sound hilarious :P

also this^^ i experienced it quite a lot

oh and not to forget all those kids that had to mute their mic because parents are sleeping and what not xD

Pushing 40 here. Voice comms are a double-edged sword to me. If I’m on a server I with people I know and trust, I still get people talking off-topic with no focus on what I’m trying to do.

Or those that don’t use push to speak and I get to listen to their dog rut with a pillow while they manage to somehow mouthbreath and eat a pizza while effectively sitting inside my skull.

I’ve been in effective comms with strangers all of once, which TTS hosted and didn’t let pubbies talk. I’m rarely on comms with people I game with and have them stay on topic, because someones teacher wasn’t nice, or their girlfriend couldn’t borrow the car or life is just so unfair.

I would love comms if you kids would talk about something worth listening to.

On the flip side, I hopped on comms with a Fractals focused guild and heard their Guild leader say that zerker gear is terrible, so I knew to quit that guild immediately. It has uses, but not often.

No to 1v1 Arenas
+1 To Solo queue. Its harsh when you are in a Pug and run into a 5 man guild team.
Team and solo/duo queues should be divided its the only thing that makes sense.
It sucks going into a game, looking at the scoreboard, and at the “team names” at game start and realizing there’s no one called “Their Guild name” on the team comps. And so you’re probably going to lose. And 3/5 times you do, cause they have comunication. kitten , even without voice chat i win way more games when i team up with guildies than on solo queues, even with duo it ups the win rate.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

@ Mister Fluffkin

I do want to point out again though, about the GW1 reference: That reference was targeted around RA play, which was like what Solo Que used to be. There is a huge audience for this type of casual gaming but GW2 is missing this element. I know that arena-net was not intending for something like TS3 to be mandatory but it just ended up happening that way due to the design of all the game modes.

The reason why Solo Ques are important is because it does not reward voice chat and offers a more casual game mode for those days when you’d rather listen to mp3s than other people talking.

Well ok, i was corresponding to GvG/HA.
I think comparing team communication in gw1 random arena and gw2 pvp isnt fair at all. Of course gw1 random arena has been without ts, because it was fully random. Gw2 isnt, so premades of course use voice chat.

And while its of course usefull to be on voicechat, i think the advantage isnt that huge at all. As someone else already said, its mostly the better team comp of a premade that brings the advantage, not the voicechat so much. The usual random team comp looks like 3+ berserks, thats the main reason randoms loose to premades.
I think the minimap is a great tool to compensate voicechat. Its much more worse in most other games.

I really miss solo queue. I don’t like sitting in TS with teens/twenty somethings. I work in corrections and listening to their bullkitten reminds me of inmates.

Drennon.7190:

I really miss solo queue. I don’t like sitting in TS with teens/twenty somethings. I work in corrections and listening to their bullkitten reminds me of inmates.

…And then you realize that your stuff sounds like bullkitten for everyone else, and since you can’t define “normal”, your complains are as valid as everyone else’s…

Let’s get this thread back on track. Let me explain why voice chat grants a large advantage for teams in Guild Wars spvp:

• When inviting new members to a guild, going over their build structures with them, giving them tutorials on how to play builds and forming proper team comps in general, you can use a voice chat to get done in 10 minutes, what typing would get done in about an hour. This is the main reason why people think that 5 man premade voice chat teams are somehow full of “better players”. The 5 man premades just have far superior communication and organization. Guild Wars 2 spvp is all about communication/organization. It is the foundation of any functional team. Voice Chat seriously expedites this process and certainly is an advantage.
• At the beginning of a match, voice chats allow much stronger and more elaborate initial splits “which is important for taking control of a match quickly and sending the enemy on stagger”. With a voice chat you can figure everything out quickly and polish out any errors. You can even decide who needs to log off and log back in with an alt and do it quickly enough so that your tactics are still sound before the match starts. This is a big advantage and something that is very difficult to do quickly enough, through typing.
• 1x great team captain that everyone trusts and listens to, is all it takes with a voice chat, for the ENTIRE TEAM to function at his level of understanding, concerning rotations. Without a voice chat, intermediate & casual level understanding of rotations begins to create gross errors in your teams rotations & strategies. When all 5 players are at an advanced level of understanding conquest rotations, voice chat just expedites the team cohesion/communication even further. With this aspect, what the voice chat is granting your team, is the ability to cut out gross errors in your teams rotations/strategies. This is a powerful advantage.
• Combat communication ~ You cannot type during pitched combat but you can easily speak during pitched combat. Voice chat is an extreme advantage when it comes to this aspect. Coordinated CCs, DPS spikes, letting people know when you need help or have a situation under control so they can peel or just plain still being able to head count call and shout any form of intel while in the middle of combat. I can’t go enough in to detail in this thread to do this section justice but I can assure you that voice chat concerning this aspect is an extreme advantage.
• Discussing post-match results. Giving the team positive re-inforcement and critical criticism when needed. Keeping the team together and focused on goals is much much much easier with a voice chat. Again, you can use a voice chat to get done in 10 minutes what would take you an hour typing and that’s if players would even be interested enough to sit and let you type at them…. for an hour.

You’ve got to understand that there is a wall that separates players in the Guild Wars 2 competitive scene and that wall is voice chat. On one side you have players who don’t use it and on the other side you have players that do use it. By merging solo joins with team joins you have essentially tried to mix oil and water. They are playing together in ques but they aren’t mixing together at all and it isn’t helping anyone in anyway. It isn’t even helping the non-voice chat users merge with the community and here is why:

From the standpoint of a guild leader/team captain myself, I can tell you that I don’t accept joins who are unwilling to get on TS3 with us. They are a liability in team play and require too much time dedicated towards a single individual when I have to sit and type to them, the exact same thing that I just told everyone else, on the TS3. Here-in is the entire point of why I made this thread to begin with. It would be nice to invite these types of players and give them a place within the community “if there was a game mode that did not entirely reward voice chat” but as of now, there is no incentive whatsoever to play with these players and only reasons to stay away from them, after the merging of solo and team.

So what do we have here? A competitive scene that promotes volatility because people who refuse to use voice chat are forced to play against people who are using voice chat, even though they are refusing to play with the people who use voice chat and it just kittenes them all off as they repeatedly beat their heads against that wall I mentioned, each and every night.

The solution is very simple:

• Bring back solo que, make it ranked only, give them their own competitive scene
• Bring back team que, make it ranked only, voice chatters play here
• Make practice/hotjoin function exactly like unranked functions now

Bumping it one more time before season 3 begins and then I’ll leave it alone.