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).
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.
Background sounds should not trigger voice. Typing should not trigger voice.
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.
Been doing it for a couple of years. It's not as simple as you think to deal with something like this. If you think it's a once and done deal, you've obviously never had to deal with stuff like this in a group of more than 5 people.
It isn’t. Setups change. Stuff gets uninstalled and reinstalled. Old members leave, new ones join. Environments change. Fiddling with that shit isn’t worth the effort and it’s a complete waste of time when a perfect solution exists.
Mumble offers signal to noise detection that can be more effective than amplitude detection in many but not all situations. I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more widely.
Even for Overwatch in a group with 2-3 friends I’d much rather have them use PTT because a lot of people are keyboard-smashing typists who can’t set the mic transmit threshold right.
How can so many people be complaining about keyboard sounds?! I assume they ain't using a mechanical keyboard, and/or they ain't using a laptop with built-in mic, but a headset.
I think that's exactly it, as well as the comparative twitchiness of the game. You don't have time to fiddle with an extra button in something like Overwatch while you can probably exchange a couple of emails and check twitter during a single FF14 GCD.
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.