Just give SoloQ mics already....

I cannot imagine how much insults I need to hear then regarding this community is toxic rather than healthy.

This is what I mean- voice chat won't create that baseline the way people think it will.

At best, and this is looking at it through pretty generous lenses, it'll very slightly bridge the gap by adding a small number of instances where solo queue teammates aren't as harmed by lack of information, but it won't do that for most games and it won't fully bridge the gap even in the games it helps.

Even in other games with voice chat, you don't actually need to use it because the game provides a lot of information at base. Bare minimum DBD needs to be in that position before voice chat could be considered reasonable.

People tear eachothers throats out in the end game chat every 2nd round, youd only have people screaming at eachother, blaring music, kids crying in the background, 10 year olds telling you how to play and now letting you know that you are playing with 10 year olds instead of just "survivors", people trash talking eachother at every generator etc. When the game is alredy so censored you barely type an insult, voice chat would completely negate that. It really is just one of those games thats better off without it.

Adding voicehat to survivor would instantly remove the mechanical differences between "solo" and "swf".

All that'd be left would be the survivors' own choices and agency and skill issues which the devs cant touch.

I dread the day people demand buffs to survivor because bad players perform worse than good players without being able to blame swf. I'll be the first to point the exact same thing applying to nurse, which sadly wont shut up the hypocrites.

the only reason adding voice chat would be useful in this game for soloQ would be to prove how lack of communications isn't the reason so many survs are having very miserable matches

I don't think I'm conveying my position properly, so let me scale back and ask you something:

What is it that voice chat provides, that translates to a baseline for balancing? What changes, what's the benefit being proposed?

Right, so, that is what I'm saying you won't get.

When people talk about adding voice chat, they always breeze past a few critical assumptions when setting up the benefits. They assume everyone in the match has a mic to use, they assume everyone in the match has the desire to use a mic, and they assume everyone in the match has the ability to communicate with the other people that they queued up with.

There are two major points I want to make here, and they're linked, so bear with me for both.

Point one: The first and biggest hurdle to overcome is one that certain regions simply will not be able to overcome, which is the language barrier. Even assuming everyone in the match has a mic and has the ability to use the mic, it doesn't really matter if one player speaks English, one speaks French, and the remaining two speak Spanish. Sure, those last two can communicate with each other, but not with the other two, and the other two also can't communicate with each other either.

Add onto that the other factors that can affect voice chat's ability to function even when everyone speaks the same language - mic quality, background noise, harassment causing some players to shut down comms entirely, etcetera - and suddenly voice chat becomes an extremely volatile and inconsistent tool. This leads to…

Point two: If the goal is to provide a consistent baseline of information survivors can use to coordinate with one another, and voice comms are an extremely inconsistent and volatile tool… we're right back at square one.

The problem we're aiming to fix is that some players have information and some don't, with the ones who don't having that information denied for reasons outside their control. That's the exact same position we'd be in with voice chat, from a balancing perspective barely anything has changed.

In short: Voice comms don't give you the ability to directly communicate with someone. They're only one variable that has to line up for you to get that benefit, and neither you nor BHVR control the others.

Information gain has to first come from the game itself. We've gotten a few good additions over the years there, but there are still gaps.

The other half of this conversation, of course, is that in solo queue you are never going to be able to coordinate the way that pre-made groups can. That's true of all games that have a solo queue, it's not a DBD thing.

I can't speak to R6 Siege or TCM as I haven't played those (I think TCM's voice chat was like, badly done, wasn't it? I remember that being a complaint) but I can speak to another video game in a similar vein: Overwatch.

I used to play ranked queue Overwatch fairly consistently, and let me tell you, if that game were balanced around its voice chat as the primary method of conveying information, it'd have been unplayable. The amount of times I actually got to just communicate with the other players in the match using the voice chat primarily really wasn't that common, because the issues I described constantly got in the way. The language barrier was a very common problem, people with terrible mic quality making it hard to understand what they were saying was quite common, people with massive background noise pollution were not quite as common but still hardly rare…

There is an exception to that, though. When I visited Canada for a spell, I did actually get to use voice chat more consistently, because while the other problems were obviously still present, most people in that matchmaking region there spoke the same language as me. So, clearly, voice chat is not a worldwide solution to a lack of coordination or information.

There are two other noteworthy things to mention here.

1: Overwatch wasn't balanced around the voice comms being the primary method of information. There are tons of ways Overwatch gives information to players who aren't speaking on voice comms- those are what BHVR need to look into, not voice comms. However, they need to keep in mind point two:

2: Overwatch also wasn't different to DBD in another regard. If you queued up solo in Overwatch, you did not get to coordinate on the same level as premade groups, full stop. That will never be possible in multiplayer games like this, and therefore shouldn't be the goal. Bridging the gap should focus on the things that BHVR can effect, while accepting that solo queue is inherently just always going to be less organised than the alternative. That's always gonna be a thing with solo queue, BHVR are good devs but they can't fix inherent issues with multiplayer games as a whole like that.