I really wish Discord would implement an audio compressor (or if they use one, make it much more aggressive) for voice chat. For example, Mumble doesn't require manually adjusting anyone's volume - instead, it uses a compressor to automatically normalize volumes for everyone.

In contrast, Discord has a volume slider that I end up having to adjust for most people. That requires manual tweaking, often while I'm playing a game, and isn't future-proof; just the other day, one of my friends changed his microphone setup and was extremely loud (I had him at 200% when in the new setup he should've been at about 75%).

This is really my only complaint with Discord's VOIP functionality. It is a major step backward from Mumble. (Also, for some reason the Discord community mostly uses voice activated mic instead of push-to-talk, but I don't think that's Discord's fault.)

I wonder if the difference in PTT vs voice activated has to do with the common games being played at the time.

PTT is mandatory running an MMORPG raid with 40 people. Voice activated is perfect for playing a game while talking with 3-8 people at a time.

Eh we raided Mythics with 25 where most people had voice activation. Was perfectly fine.

I think it's more about who you're playing with, if you are good friends with the people that you are on voice with, chances are you're quite alike and considerate to each other.

Wouldn't the sheer overlap of sounds of people mashing on their keyboards drive you insane? I'm usually fine with voice activation in a smaller group (like maybe 5 people) but once you get up to 25 people, I feel like the background noise could seriously overpower some really important callouts that one might need to hear (in the context of something like Mythic raiding).

>Wouldn't the sheer overlap of sounds of people mashing on their keyboards drive you insane?

That's a hint that the voice activation level is not configured correctly.

This is not high enough. Spending a few minutes setting voice activation is critical, and can go a long way toward helping with issues people have with voice activation. Background sounds should not trigger voice. Typing should not trigger voice. The issues is many people don't do this, and so make the assumption that voice activation is bad.

Couple that with people not being considerate of others (such as not muting when you do need to make noise that will be picked up), it gives voice activation a bad rap.

But in terms of pure quality, voice activation is always, in my mind, better than PTT. Granted, the last few years I've only really ever played with friends and in small groups, so when people forget, we aren't righteous assholes about it.

That's right. Voice activity detection (VAD) is not the same as sound detection. WebRTC even has a really good VAD built into it that is extremely easy to use and dynamically adapts to the current audio environment. See e.g. https://github.com/wiseman/py-webrtcvad and https://github.com/dpirch/libfvad for examples where the relatively small VAD code has been pulled out of the giant webrtc corpus.

People also need to know to enable AEC in their audio driver, which completely solves the problem of whatever sounds they're playing leaking into their mic.