Discord merged the voice channels of Teamspeak/Ventrilo with the text chat syste... (2024)

Would you believe it if I told you: there's a few game groups out there that use both. My milsim group uses discord for general chat, recruiting, linksharing and planning for our weekly weekend missions. I think there's one voice channel. For us, the Discord is the public facing entity where you'll find members from the group interacting with people who just hang out and chat and aren't enrolled in the roster.

But our TeamSpeak server has 20 something channels, there are plugins written by community members that integrate with ARMA. And any other general group gaming that requires actual voice comms, it's Teamspeak or bust.

It was quite something to behold when I first joined the group, I had grown used to groups using one, the other, but not both. This group does it really well.

Discord is definitely a great evolution above Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, and Mumble.

Though if you want to get old school, MPlayer did voice chat before it was "cool", way before 2005. If you remember what MPlayer is, you know you're already old.

Back then MPlayer was free, which is kind of where TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble fell off, either you had some technical know-how to host it yourself (and the bandwidth to do so properly) or you paid for hosted solutions. It was only a matter of time before a free solution came around and stole the user base with intelligent marketing, nice interface, and a decent product.