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Party Chat Killed Online Gaming (Community)?

Well, I think it just depends on your perspective. If you're part of a group that regularly party chats, you don't miss the old days at all. If you don't regularly party chat, you probably do miss how it used to be. So it's really impossible to say which is better.

Though for what it's worth I do kinda miss how things used to be. Now I never speak to anyone unless I'm in party chat. Which is fun, but different.

If you're in the group that regularly party chats you aren't interacting with the community of the game you're playing though.
 
The popularity of party chat is a reflection of what public chat became. It was basically a bunch of idiots using all kinds of offensive language and generally being a-holes. So people have either moved to party chat or just disabled chat all together. Kind of sucks because in the xbox days, public chat was pretty cool. People would help each other with gameplay, people would work as a team, it was a cool social event. The idiots have killed all that.
 
There were a couple times I played some Killzone on PS4 by myself with a mic. One of those times I played with some pretty cool guys. But I mainly only use party chat. I can definitely see the argument that the OP is making, but I guess an online community just isn't important enough to me to care. I'd rather talk to the people I know than end up with some kid singing into the mic or screaming out racial slurs.
 
i'm a great big no mates xbox gamer and the amount of peopple I've had to mute on halo dropped off massively with the introduction of party chat. Sadly the odd occasion where people would actually communicate dropped with it.

Small price to pay I guess. I sort of wish I had mates in my timezone (or these days even friends that multiplay)
 
In game chat was fun in the early days of the 360, but the majority of people started using party chat as a default for a reason. Little kids screaming, abuse and guys playing music at full volume became far too common.
 
My favorite gaming period of the 360 was before party chat.

Chatting with all the people that played PDZ and Gears was great! Fights, friends, shit talking, randoms. So many great memories.

It's so much more work to challenge someone to a 1v1 now a days, haha!
 
There were a couple times I played some Killzone on PS4 by myself with a mic. One of those times I played with some pretty cool guys. But I mainly only use party chat. I can definitely see the argument that the OP is making, but I guess an online community just isn't important enough to me to care. I'd rather talk to the people I know than end up with some kid singing into the mic or screaming out racial slurs.

That is the worst.
 
What's just as annoying as a person being obnoxious on a mic? Having background music, sound effects, or people in the background making noise that can be heard on the mic.
 
I find myself, on occasion, sticking around in games in which I'm being trash-talked just for the sheer novelty of it.

I was playing TLoU recently and I don't own a mic. This guy I was playing against on the other team after every match would pick a new reason I sucked despite winning every game. I would just change how I won every game and he kept moving those goal posts. Good times and wouldn't have been possible with party chat.
 
I like party chat because I don't have to deal with people giving me shit about my voice. " You sound like you have a d*** in your mouth" and "you sound like a F*****" stuff just gets on my nerves.

Now granted back in the day open mic in CoD4 was pretty awesome. Listening to people cheer when you ninja defused a bomb was great.
 
It definitely killed the online community in my experience.

I'm willing to tolerate cursing racist little kids if it means that the other 90% of the people in the server are talking and having a good time.

I miss the Halo 2 days of damn near everyone in game having a mic and using it.
 
It has taken away something.

Sometimes i miss the trashtalking, gave the games an edge when someone had mouthed off in the pre-game lobby and there was nothing sweeter giving it back once you'd beaten them.

I do miss connecting with new people, i made some good friends on xbl just through in game chat.

you can always find a community online though most games have something you can meet other players on.
 
Wait...you can't talk to randoms when using party chat? Lol what a Counter intuitive feature. Just add that to the list of reasons I don't feel I missed out by completely skipping the xbox 360.
 
I made some "online friends" back in the PS2 days and early Xbox 360 days before party chat playing the Star Wars Battlefront games. I was even recruited into a clan!

I sympathize with those against open chat, and I do think that P2P matchmaking goes hand in hand with party chat.

I prefer traditional server based games, where either you are talking to everyone on your team or the whole server. You can actually get to know the regulars on the server and really be in a community.
 
People say this all of the time, but communication has to stem from the game making it important and not optional. XBL 1.0 gets brought up all of the time as some kind of proof, but all that shows is that giving a relatively small number of people a new private gaming network to play on with headset and chat as standard is a neat, novel way to experience multiplayer gaming for a lot people...but it doesn't last just because of all of the public bullshit that comes with it. Party chat is great and needed. If communication is to be of real importance among public players, you need the kinds of games that force the issue, not lone wolf-fests.
 
I made some "online friends" back in the PS2 days and early Xbox 360 days before party chat playing the Star Wars Battlefront games. I was even recruited into a clan!

I sympathize with those against open chat, and I do think that P2P matchmaking goes hand in hand with party chat.

I prefer traditional server based games, where either you are talking to everyone on your team or the whole server. You can actually get to know the regulars on the server and really be in a community.

Agreed. Consoles don't follow this logic though.
 
As someone mainly playing Socom, eh.
nobody cared about team mates not in your clan and everyone on the other team just bitches all the time.

As for COD, its great not to listen to 5 year olds or adults that can only use the N word apparently.
 
There were a couple times I played some Killzone on PS4 by myself with a mic. One of those times I played with some pretty cool guys. But I mainly only use party chat. I can definitely see the argument that the OP is making, but I guess an online community just isn't important enough to me to care. I'd rather talk to the people I know than end up with some kid singing into the mic or screaming out racial slurs.

This. I can understand the argument that the community loses something when everyone is talking in their own bubble, but I'd gladly take talking with my friends over talking to strangers shouting curse words at me when I make a mistake.

yup, hate the idea of party, always enjoyed talking trash online, but know with party chats, is all too friendly n quite in the outside world.
Hate to break this to you, but I think the far majority of people prefer friendly and quiet to someone screaming at them about how they're a horrible waste of a human being.
 
I'm of the mind that what you get out of chatting in a public game is directly correlated to what you put in. If you want to just throw a sweeping generalization of "everyone is a racist/homophone/asshole" out there then that's all you're going to get out of it, ever.

I made tons of friends over the years on XBL just randomly hopping into a game with a simple "Hey whats up" and getting a similar response. Playing and conversing and having a good time, then throwing out the friend request when the session ended.

Some of the best memories were in Gears of War where when you died, you'd be tossed into the "death chat" and you AND your opponents would have a chance to talk shit or just comment on what's happening in the game. So many great moments of actually spectating games with people and having a blast. I can remember adding opponents just based on the fact me and my friends would have great matches against them and agree to meet up and play again.

That's all gone with Party Chat. Now everyone just loads that up, invites their friends, then they go join a game. It's ingrained now in the online community that that is the routine and it's really killed my desire to ever play online anymore.
 
I can relate an anecdote from Star Wars Battlefront. After playing a few matches, someone added me to friends on Xbox 360. I was 30, and he sounded young. Turns out he was 13. There was something uncomfortable to me about being on the friends list of a kid that young that wasn't a family member... I don't think his parents would want him "hanging out" with adults.
 
Here's a different take, the rise of matchmaking replaces community run servers and destroys the self-policing that existed in the community. Without any moderation, public chat in matchmaking quickly devolves into something no rational person can stand. Party chat comes along and saves people from that wasteland.
 
I played SOCOM on PS2 extensively and met some great people through that from only chatting in game.

None of my friends played games at the time so I never had my own circle of friends to rely on for banter.

I have put in 79 hours on BF4 and haven't spoken to a single person, multi player games that your friends from real life don't play are a lonely experience for me.

SOCOM 2 was the pinnacle of chat and actual game related tactics chat for me, sure there were some complete arseholes but they were far outweighed by the good folk.

The game also used Push To Talk so the comms were not flooded by babies crying and folk listening to loud trance music, open comms in games are the worst thing ever invented.
 
The popularity of party chat is a reflection of what public chat became. It was basically a bunch of idiots using all kinds of offensive language and generally being a-holes. So people have either moved to party chat or just disabled chat all together. Kind of sucks because in the xbox days, public chat was pretty cool. People would help each other with gameplay, people would work as a team, it was a cool social event. The idiots have killed all that.



It is really sad that this multi-billion dollar industry can't come up with better ways to separate unpleasant people from the community at large. :(
 
Game chat is not what it used be. It was fun back then but nowadays the mute button tends to be hovered over once I get into a lobby. I do agree tho I don't make as many new friends as I did back then
 
Here's a different take, the rise of matchmaking replaces community run servers and destroys the self-policing that existed in the community. Without any moderation, public chat in matchmaking quickly devolves into something no rational person can stand. Party chat comes along and saves people from that wasteland.

Agree with this too, match making destroys the need for a community, you play with people you know you will never bump in to again.
 
Party Chat makes MP games playable... I used to play Halo 2 all the time with mics and it was great, then most of the world turned into trash talking racist 13 year olds and ruined everything.... Party Chat didn't kill the online community the people that make up the community killed it, Party Chat is a Hazmat suit protecting us from the real disease... other people.
 
100% agree. The Halo 2 days were magical. Plus, it had proximity voice - meaning I could sneak into an enemy base and then start singing to them until they found me.

LMFAO or "Hey team, I'm going to arm the bomb by walking in the right side of their base! Meet me!"

-silently walks into the left side of the base as several red dots move towards the right-

RIP

Here's a different take, the rise of matchmaking replaces community run servers and destroys the self-policing that existed in the community. Without any moderation, public chat in matchmaking quickly devolves into something no rational person can stand. Party chat comes along and saves people from that wasteland.

This was definitely a large part of it.
 
I'm in two minds about this.

I did used to love a bit of banter in and at the end of games between your team and your opponents.

But that was the glory days of Halo 2/3.

Since then xbox live I feel got so much worse and just the amount of kids really did spike when call of duty came about, or maybe I was a squeaker and then grew up then suddenly it was like oh wow.

Nowadays We usually have a full team of people all in party chat where we can speak freely to each other and not have to put up with the griefing.

Although saying that I now don't make friends online anymore now and this then leads to me playing games often alone but still in party chat as I simply can't be bothered to talk to others as more frequently than not they're controller tough guys which I have no time for.
 
Here's a different take, the rise of matchmaking replaces community run servers and destroys the self-policing that existed in the community. Without any moderation, public chat in matchmaking quickly devolves into something no rational person can stand. Party chat comes along and saves people from that wasteland.
Yeah, lack of server browsing and an over-reliance upon auto-matching really does limit the potential for organized and coherent voice chat.
 
Now before you skip the OP and blast me for suggesting online gaming is dead I mean the quality of the community.

Back in the OG Xboz days when I played Halo 2 everyone had a mic and the community was thriving. The same can be said of many other games like SC: Chaos Theory. Nowadays people barely talk in games at all in comparison. http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=783780&page=1 I feel like a big reason for that is party chat. People stay in their chat and don't interact with the community. That leads to the online play in games to dry up a lot faster.

When I play TLoU's multiplayer people talk a great deal despite the PS3 not coming with a mic. I don't think that's a coincidence.

Edit: this http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=783780&page=1

Thoughts?

had that thought back then, when party chat started on xbox.

unbelievable. it was enough to mute stupid screamer or people just listening to music over the mic... but thanks party chat, i literally never ever again met new people on xbox.

sad, but this is how we consume online-gaming these days :(
 
Gears of War 1 was fan-fucking-tastic with the open chat. The trashtalking was insane. Four friends against four strangers, rivalries spanning the whole night on multiple maps, good times.

Then party chat happened, and things got quiet and dull.


There's two kinds of people that will answer this question:
Those who played Gears of War 1 online and those who did not. You know who you are, and you remember why regular "community" chat was awesome. I hardly ever play online (console) games nowadays for this reason.

This guy/girl gets it.
 
Gears of War 1 was fan-fucking-tastic with the open chat. The trashtalking was insane. Four friends against four strangers, rivalries spanning the whole night on multiple maps, good times.

Then party chat happened, and things got quiet and dull.

Such amazing times.. Bungie had an incredible opportunity to bring us a Custom Games Browswer alongside Matchmaking, but that idea never came to fruition as other devs copied Matchmaking and Browsers slowly dropped off.
 
I feel really stupid to ask this...but what is a party chat? How is that different from regular game chat?

I never chatted on videogame so I really don't know these stuff...
 
I feel really stupid to ask this...but what is a party chat? How is that different from regular game chat?

I never chatted on videogame so I really don't know these stuff...

Only chat with your friends, who you invited to your party.
 
I didn't play Gears 1 online, but it sounds very much like my Star Wars Battlefront experience. The rivalries and actually funny trolling were great, since you logged in with a GameSpy account, and you could change your online name or make multiple accounts. It was easy to make joke or trolling account names that only the regulars would understand. :D
 
I'm of the mind that what you get out of chatting in a public game is directly correlated to what you put in. If you want to just throw a sweeping generalization of "everyone is a racist/homophone/asshole" out there then that's all you're going to get out of it, ever.

I made tons of friends over the years on XBL just randomly hopping into a game with a simple "Hey whats up" and getting a similar response. Playing and conversing and having a good time, then throwing out the friend request when the session ended.

Some of the best memories were in Gears of War where when you died, you'd be tossed into the "death chat" and you AND your opponents would have a chance to talk shit or just comment on what's happening in the game. So many great moments of actually spectating games with people and having a blast. I can remember adding opponents just based on the fact me and my friends would have great matches against them and agree to meet up and play again.

That's all gone with Party Chat. Now everyone just loads that up, invites their friends, then they go join a game. It's ingrained now in the online community that that is the routine and it's really killed my desire to ever play online anymore.

Totally agree with you. I loved gears mp and have done the same thing. In all mp games there needs to be a random gametype for people who only use game chat. The way it usually works for me is when you find a mach with a good team, then you stick with them so you don't have to worry about the kids or trash talkers as much. I still have the desire to play online because I love playing fps's, but it's way more boring to play when no one is in game chat and your friends aren't online.
 
I feel really stupid to ask this...but what is a party chat? How is that different from regular game chat?

I never chatted on videogame so I really don't know these stuff...

Regular chat is in game with the people in the lobby you are in. Party chat is a private chat with your friends who can be playing different games.

I agree that party chat has killing online gaming communities because people turn their mic off. Call of Duty 2 was incredible. People talked, were nice, and it was awesome but that was when the console first launched. That being said - party chat is awesome but it has killed the online lobby chats in every game.
 
Only chat with your friends, who you invited to your party.

Regular chat is in game with the people in the lobby you are in. Party chat is a private chat with your friends who can be playing different games.

I agree that party chat has killing online gaming communities because people turn their mic off. Call of Duty 2 was incredible. People talked, were nice, and it was awesome but that was when the console first launched. That being said - party chat is awesome but it has killed the online lobby chats in every game.

oh ok so it doesn't matter what game you are playing, you are always in that chat group and while you are in the chat group all the regular game chats are automatically disabled I guess?
 
Party chat is great. The one big downside is that it ruins single life games. When I would play Gears 3 with friends, being able to talk to people that have already been killed ruined the game. People could fly around the map and let you know where the other team is.
 
I'm chatting more than ever since party chat, the only difference is that i'm chatting with my friends instead of with complete strangers who are often very impolite and often resort to name calling.
 
There is no better feeling in gaming than your group of friends beating another group after some heavy trashtalking.

For that reason Gears of War 1 is still my favourite multiplayer game ever, by a huge margin.
 
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