TeamSpeak is still used by milsim/flightsim communities because it support plugins which integrate the in-sim radios with the VoIP system.
EDIT: Got Vent and TS mixed up
As someone who managed a gaming guild since 2005, I have seen many iterations. In the beginning it was all Skype, then we switched to Ventrilo and PhpBB, then many went to FB for text, then to Teamspeak for voice, then to Slack for text again, and now Discord for both text and voice.
The needs of the community didn't really change. They wanted persistent chat for text and images, put up announcements to guide new players, have votes/elections, and use team voice chats during play sessions. Each combination above solved those problems, each with its own unique benefits and drawbacks. Mumble's use case is exclusively on the team voice chats but it lacks any direct support for anything else which is likely why we never used it, even after I provided a server for free.
Nowadays I use my Mumble server for cooperative remote work, a job which it works perfectly for.
But our TeamSpeak server has 20 something channels, there are plugins written by community members that integrate with ARMA. And any other general group gaming that requires actual voice comms, it's Teamspeak or bust.
It was quite something to behold when I first joined the group, I had grown used to groups using one, the other, but not both. This group does it really well.
Though if you want to get old school, MPlayer did voice chat before it was "cool", way before 2005. If you remember what MPlayer is, you know you're already old.
Back then MPlayer was free, which is kind of where TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble fell off, either you had some technical know-how to host it yourself (and the bandwidth to do so properly) or you paid for hosted solutions. It was only a matter of time before a free solution came around and stole the user base with intelligent marketing, nice interface, and a decent product.
Murmur server is free though. It even runs great off of a home internet connection if you have the technical know-how to open the ports and set up a dynamic dns service.
When the service I was on started charging even for their bottom tier, switching to Discord was a no-brainer. It just works right out of the box, at least for most people.
I've been invited to like a million different discord groups from friend groups that overlap in various ways, and they always seem to be full of a bunch of people I don't know reposting memes off of reddit in the chat channels.
All I wanted was a voice chat with the 5 people who I know and am hopping into Overwatch with. Mumble does that job better, and guzzles less of my RAM to do it.
The feature that got us on the mumble train years ago was how well it auto-balances the sound volume coming from different users. Other software we tried at the time you’d have some people much louder than others. This is probably pretty standard by now though.
EDIT: missed edit window on my parent comment, but a funny note related to Electron system resource usage. In addition to the RAM thing, it's based on Chromium which means it's using the GPU for rendering. There's an option in the config to disable this, otherwise it makes you exit the Discord client when you install GPU driver updates.
Not a huge deal, but it feels real silly when you get that popup. Like "I get that I need to close games to update GPU drivers, but my voice chat? Really?"
I'd love if that was it. It's when you see horrifying 4chan greentext that I start to cringe.
For an Overwatch specific if more unusual use case, if you want to have a group of 12 people organizing private 6v6 matches, this is much easier to coordinate when you can all hop into a single shared voice channel between matches to chat, talk trash, reshuffle teams, etc.
For hanging out with people and just having casual conversations I think it's fine. Don't say anything you want kept private. I do think it's unfortunate that people don't consider where their data is going or how it's used on a broader scale, but for those of us who use technology more intimately I think we can afford to make these sorts of decisions. I'm happy with the convenience and the interface and I'm okay knowing that the communications are likely going to end up in the hands of some big marketing company some day.
Which is fine, except the analogy in this case is someone who is always sitting next to you and has access to all your conversational history - which may be public in isolation but private in aggregate.
That doesn't mean they can't also sell your data, but if your root concern is where they're getting their revenue, game sales is where.
They tried to pivot themselves into a game store, but that appears to not have gone particularly well.
Not too sure on the privacy front. I don't believe they sell any user data, yet.
[1] - https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-m...
I still wouldn't recommend using it for anything because of the potential gold mine they have with the user data. I can imagine Tencent or someone similar coming in for the data alone.
Oh please. The CEO's last company got sued for that and this time he made sure to make it obvious in the ToS.
You do know though, absolutely everyone. Read their ToS and they make it pretty obvious.
- The ToS has nothing to do with data usage
- The privacy policy explicitly states they don't sell user data
- Multiple employees are on the record as saying they don't
- There's no evidence they do
- They've said that nitro subscriptions and game selling are done to avoid ever needing to do ads/data selling.
- They're VC funded to the tune of over $100 million and thus have taken their time with monetization options.
Discord "selling data" is nothing more than a (very) weak conspiracy theory.
Where I think Mumble particularly shined was being one of the first to broadly introduce the Opus codec which really set low latency communications into play. Mumble was really a champion in this space.
I find it hard to believe that Discord, in its design, didn't evaluate its competitors at one point and decide to follow Mumble in implementing Opus.
* Have you ever tried to self-host a server, especially on your own Windows machine? Setting it up is a confusing mess, especially the documentation. I couldn't get DBus working the first time I attempted it, so I gave up and paid for TS. Would it have been so hard to include a Murmur configuration dialog in Mumble?
* Ice? Why couldn't a simple HTTP interface work? Just look at all this troubleshooting overhead: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Ice
* UX/UI matters.
[1] https://github.com/ciribob/DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone/release...
Supposedly the next major release of Teamspeak will be Discord-like, which is somewhat concerning. Discord is apparently also working on a more robust voice API which would allow for some of the same mods to get ported over.
[1] http://radio.task-force.ru/en/ [2] https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2
Yea, this could go very badly or be the UI and permissions cleanup that TS desperately needs.
With that said, I never use it. I use TeamSpeak for audio and Discord for persistent chat. My biggest problem, and the reason I think a lot of people are discounting, is purely the aesthetics of the UI - Discord just looks nicer than Mumble. The programmer-art style of user interface seems all too common among open source software, and I don't really understand why.