1) Can you elaborate how "hierarchical chat room" works and how fleets in Eve Online use this?
2) Do other game chat apps like Discord implement anything similar?
In fights with 20-50 on each side particularly, it's really something to have the "pulse of the fight" because as a healer you can tell how well that's going.
A mumble server can be hosted with fairly low requirements if you're an org with less than 50 members in voice comms, and it's pretty embarrassing that a seemingly large majority of corporations can't even get 5 people into a call without an act of congress when gamers have tools like this so well explored.
If it's not available on, say, Discord, why is that? Do people just somehow make do without it? Or is there some other compensating feature?
So, while the feature is a must-have for a small subset of users, it's probably not seen as being worth the trouble when just supporting several flat channels is more than enough for the 99% of Discord's potential user base.
I'd still hope they at least add some kind of "broadcast to several channels" option, since that seems like the simplest version that would still be useful, but I don't really expect it.
I'm going to need a number crunch on that.
More seriously, my point was not (heaven help me) that Eve players are disorganized but that 'massive raid requiring structured multi-party voice comms' is not a common problem gamers in the current market find themselves needing to solve.
Discord only allows you to be a membere of one channel at a time.
It is not an uncommon set-up for fleets to have the important people have their own channel talking about secret stuff and another one for the rest of the fleet.
Then the ones from the secret channel have two buttons set up, one to talk just to them and one to talk with the entire fleet.
This is all a difficult communication problem, but it's doubly difficult because decisions need to propagate up and down your communication hierarchy in seconds. Being able to manage this level of communication without it being a hopeless clusterfuck is a defining feature of effective organizations of players.
Not from direct experience, we used a much simpler setup for some events on a minecraft server to allow for team voice.
Mumble also has much better security/permissions. Last time I looked it was pretty easy to dump the list of active users on a discord "chat". That means you could always know if someone was forming for an attack etc.
The use case I had was if I wanted teamchat/allchat done via different hotkeys, like if I were playing with some friends on an RTS and wanted to talk crap on all while strategizing on team.
Edit: my two cents: I've been running Mumble for a long time, and though it isn't as multi-tooled as TS, I love its simplicity and its quality.
However, if you join a large alliance/coalition, fleets can easily get to 100+ player counts, and a single discord voice chat room becomes unusable. It is extremely important that you follow the fleet commander's instructions during a fleet. That is where Mumble shines with the fleet commander residing in a top level voice channel, with other members in lower-level voice channels that he cannot hear. It also allows for lower-level members to join voice channels designated as "quiet", so you don't have to listen to the chatter of 100 drunk Eve players during a Friday night fleet.