In principle it sounds unfortunate.
What practical ones do you have in mind?
I genuinely am unaware how badly, or not, we are afflicted by this.
While abusers (especially the worse ones) are a relatively small fraction of the population here, they are still present and require a significant amount of time to deal with, overall.
I donāt think that it would necessarily increase the frequency of abuse, but if the voice chats were completely unmoderated, I think it would increase the likelihood of abusers to use that channel to send their abuse, allow for a larger quantity of abusive messaging from the same set of abusers.
However, besides that, I think that having abuse delivered via audio could greatly increase the severity of abuse. There are some awfully persistent and heinous trolls that would likely utilize such a feature (while circumventing bans and using alts) to bombard their victims with relentless voice attacks. Getting awful text messages is bad enough, but I imagine that hearing someone yell them at you is even worse.
I want to stress this point, since I strongly disagree with the view that this sort of feature would not need moderation.
Moderation is definitely required and would require infrastructure to store and review at least the reported voice chats. Already, moderators have to do a lot to address the massive volumes of tetx-based abuse that a small set of trolls generate. I imagine that it would be quite unpleasant having to spend time listen to and review all of the potentially abusive audio clips that this feature might generate.
I imagine that a lot of users would feel this way, and either to seek to disable it, or come to complain on the forums/chat when they canāt figure out how.
In fact, I think that if something like voice chat were added, it should be opt-in. That is, it should be disabled by default, and users should have to manually turn on the feature and maybe even have to approve receiving voice chats from any particular user.
While @benjitoās suggestion of having to manually play each clip is another way to do this, it could have some drawbacks of its own:
- It interferes with the real-time nature of voice chat.
- This should be implemented in a way to avoid downloading the audio clips altogether, if the user does not want to play them.
Note that item 2 is an important consideration, since having users receive audio clips may play an additional burden on their network connections. Some users may be relying on connections that have limited bandwidth or even paying a data rate.
Some have mentioned this as possibly only a front-end feature? How would sending audio work, then? Via a direct connection between the users? Some cheaters could abuse such a connection to try to disrupt their opponent in order to cause them to timeout.
8 Likes
Not quite. Random noise is misbehavior or accident. Not the usual case.
The feature is Push To Talk. First push, then talk, then release. Similar to voice messages in messengers such as WhatsApp.
It is not a voice call connection. It is an exchange of messages. Exactly like text. But the payload is voice.