I'm sorry but I disagree, Teamspeak and Ventrilo's voice comms is still far superior, not even counting the fact that both of them can be fully integrated with a lot of games, (arma for example with teamspeak to allow proper team-radio, interference, filters, static, radius audio etc). The quality, reliability and bandwidth is way better than Discord.
It's just a centralised, slightly more fancy IRC system with *very* basic audio implementation, I'm afraid comparing it to long-standing greats like TS and Vent just doesn't ring true at all. You can't pick your codec or quality and it goes roboty and lags *alot*...
It's getting better, don't get me wrong, but it's far from 'easily the best'. It's just a web-app chucked in an electron wrapper for desktop. It's a good text-comms system and the alerts are 'okay' but can be cumbersome if you're on more than one server, you end up having to turn 90% of them off, which ultimately just makes it kind of half useless.
It's nice that they're keeping it mostly free, but if they are going with this 'paid extra' thing I wonder how long before they start dropping in ads like Twitch did/does.
Also they need to offer a decentralised completely private option that you can host yourself.
I'll have to agree to disagree with you.
How are they superior? Their game integration is extremely limited, and is implemented by third parties not Teamspeak/Vent themselves - the same could easily be done for Discord, and you can be damn sure it will be the standard moving forward.
TS3/Vent are terribly dated, in terms of user interface, chat integration and how they are hosted. They stopped competing because they thought they couldn't get any better, then Discord came along - now they are miles behind.
You mention quality - you are quite clearly mistaken if you think TS3 has higher quality than Discord. Look up the codecs yourself that each uses and you'll see how wrong your statement is.
Reliability? Discord hasn't gone down for us since the first few months. Reliability of Teamspeak Vent relies largely on whichever server provider you are with - and it's not like you could recover them if your server went down, so you'd be just as out of luck. It's a poor comparison at best, and Discord's uptime is clearly viewable on their site
https://status.discordapp.com/ again TS3/Vent's reliability would be on a per server basis.
if you really think that its just IRC in a skin I'm afraid you might be slightly deluded. It's a centralized chat platform, integrated decent text chat along with the same high quality voice offered by the competition, with a good modern interface. Before this my raid group was using a combination of TS3 and Whatsapp for text chat, and that comes with it's own bunch of problems, the biggest being the two worlds never connected properly - Discord really couldn't be better in my opinion. The notifications is going to be a per user thing on a per server basis - if you are in giant gaming groups from Reddit, then yeah you're going to mute them - how do you think it should be handled?
"Also they need to offer a decentralised completely private option that you can host yourself."
I just can't see why anyone would want too, this is a social platform and should be treated like one, segregation is already possible it being hosted on your own server should hold 0 weight on whether you will use the service or not.
