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Comment by w-ll | Hacker News Reader

This reminds be of doing WOW raids with Ventrilo back in the day, and how much I miss that, but something missing from back then.

It didnt have screens but it had multiple rooms, so full-party/group leaders/tanks/healers/dps/etc...each had rooms, and you could still 1on1 with someone.

Sometimes I feel like a team/department would like to discuss, or maybe even someone 1on1 wants to talk, and it seams all moderen meeting software misses that today.

I hadn't actually thought about this in a while, but there are few things more stressful than the entire company/raid party watching over every breath and movement, and being able to talk to a coworker or someone/team can't really be done with todays meeting software because its 1... ONE... shared room, vs even in recent memory at least in office teams were in the own spaces/buildings/etc, and they could mute the confrence call and talk amongst themselves.

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That's actually exactly what I thought of when reading the article: the sinking silence where everyone knows we're gonna wipe, but nobody wants to be the first to say it. Or, conversely, the busy silence where everybody's concentrating on their part and nothing needs to be said because everyone can see what needs doing is being done, especially on well-trodden but still touchy content. Or even the nervous silence as the pulling hunter tries really hard to thread the needle and not get the patrol too. Filling (or not filling) those silences was a big part of good raid leading.

Even more than raiding, large-scale pvp with hundreds of people had some bad silences: if it's quiet, nobody's calling, so the callers are all either dead or tanking, so your Lanchester's square law effects go out the window as piles are lost and damage is dispersed for want of direction.

But specifically to your point: yeah, Discord is probably the closest to that ideal of lots of purpose-specific channels, but it doesn't have the channel and bulk user management features ts3/etc have. It was really useful to be able to programatically bulk move people by role, or give roles priority speaker/mute other roles at certain times - Huhu's dead so we can go back to not caring about the hunters, etc.

MMO leadership and tech work really do have an awful lot in common.

I think about this a lot having been both on corporate meetings and voice chat in WoW raids and how much any sort of teleconferencing software is missing stuff like:

* Mandatory PTT so you don't have people's eating/talking/background noise

* Priority speaker (or being able to turn individual people down)

* The ability to leave the main voice chat for a moment and then return.

Its so much worse than what I got with vent or mumble or discord.

> Mandatory PTT so you don't have people's eating/talking/background noise

This can somewhat be mitigated by providing people with proper headsets. Every company should issue good, convenient wireless headsets. Emphasis on "convenient" so that people aren't tempted to substitute them with worse-sounding options.

I disagree that this mitigates the quoted section from GP, even if I agree with you in general.

The benefit of mandatory push to talk cannot be significantly mitigated by any current headset system. There is a "habit of intentionality" (for lack of a better term) that comes with mandatory PTT that is missing in corporate meeting culture. It only takes one bad apple or VP with mad mic hygiene to throw away all the benefits of company-supplied noise-cancelling-dynamic-threshhold-sensing microphones.

Being able to have individuals at a different volume is something I almost desperately want in work meetings.

I'd also love something that would allow me to be in several "breakout" chats at once, but not silence everything, just allow me to turn some rooms down and mute myself in them while I interact in another. Bonus if there's an indicator of how much activity there is in the non-focused ones so I can see if something may need attention, or if everyone in it is silent, and not need to listen in.

Most conferencing software seems to treat meetings like individual entities, which works fine when they are just scheduled meetings, but isn't great when you have several groups to work with at once. Being able to have a team know you're in another chat and be able to say "Hey scaryclam, we found something, can you drop into the conversation for a minute", from their chat would be awesome in something like an incident call.

Zoom has breakout rooms

So does Teams, and if you want to 1-1 someone just click their name and the call icon. Add more people with two more clicks. Everyone on the bridge will see you’re on hold in the main call, which prevents people dialing you to rejoin and wasting time.

I find that far more often than not, when someone is lamenting the lack of a feature in communication software, the feature actually exists and they’re just not aware of it.

In the Ventrilo scenario you could hear, but not be heard by the parent room. This is the only way Eve online fleets with hundreds of participants could be coordinated for insurance. Your example works for a 1-on-1 but not for hierarchical communication layers.

Interesting, the Eve example. Are the higher-in-command in the root/parent rooms and then it's hierarchial down the line? Or can you just listen in on certain rooms as well as whatever you are talking about on?

Never got big into Ventrilo back in the day.

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