IS DISCORD REALLY THE BEST? - Voice Chat Platform Showdown

[Drak3]

4 hours ago, phongle123 said:

Hand to Hand Contact is the best.

Did you just suggest that we just bitch slap each other to communicate?!

 

 

 

 

I'm on board.

[nicklmg]

54 minutes ago, Erik Sieghart said:

Yeah my main issues with Discord is that it's great when it works.... When it works..........

 

I've had to deal with (in my group):

• rogue node.js server instances starting up randomly
• hanging on startup (with the latest version)
• stuck on startup attempting to update
• voice chat failing to work after starting up a game
• robot voice
• voice chat failing randomly and then refusing to work again until computer restart
• randomly changing audio devices to what I could tell was "whatever it felt like"

It also relies on VC funding to stay afloat and skewed priorities (they care more about policing channels than generating revenue features).

I've also had my fair share of issues with Discord, but I'm told by friends and colleagues that I'm in a minority with that.

 

My main gripe from an issue/compatibility standpoint is that their program is just straight up f**ked with the use of Bluetooth headphones. Like... how is that even possible? If I have my QC35s enabled while using Discord it sounds like I'm in a metal tube filled with running water and everyone in the channel is 50 feet above me (messing with settings has proved useless in this case). It also uses up so many system resources trying to figure out what it's supposed to do with the Bluetooth device that it completely bricks any game or other resource-intensive program that's running alongside it (I'm talking like 120fps in-game to 10...). I've tried to get some insight into why a Bluetooth device screws it up that badly and so far have had little insight from programming-inclined folks.

 

When it works, it's simple, it's great. But in my experience there are way too many instances where it just doesn't - though, again, among friends and colleagues I appear to be an outlier, so there's that..

51 minutes ago, TheKDub said:

They do have Discord Nitro as one form of income, though I wouldn't be surprised if they're selling some data.

Good to know - though I truly doubt they're making a ton from Nitro. It's tucked away in a separate site page and, from what I can see, not advertised in any other page on their site. It also provides (from what I can see) zero benefit over the free tier, which is great for fostering community sentiment, and horrible for actually making money .

 

Honestly, I HIGHLY doubt they're actively selling data today. It would be catastrphically stupid to do so while you say directly in your privacy policy that "The Company is not in the business of selling your information." I can just imagine the backlash if something got leaked proving they had active sales campaigns going on.

 

But it seems like the founders and associated VCs do have a pretty obvious way to make their money:

AKA "we will sell to someone someday, we're just waiting for the right offer to come along, and until then we're stockpiling detailed advertising profiles on every one of our users."

 

And, to be clear, I don't necessarily have a problem with them doing that. They're being very transparent with their intent, which is certainly a step above how many others have handled the topic in the past, or even how some are handling it now. But it just makes me have even less understanding for the people that go out and fight for them on the frontlines with the "THEY'RE NOT SELLING YOUR DATA BRO THEY'RE ABOVE THAT." Are they selling your data today? Probably not. But they're a business, they exist to make money, and the way that they will make their money is from your information. Tis the circle of life these days in tech - if there's no obvious direct source of income, you're probably either selling or planning to sell data.

19 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Did you just suggest that we just bitch slap each other to communicate?!

 

 

 

 

I'm on board.

Well, it is almost American Slapsgiving...

[Drak3]

Just now, nicklmg said:

Well, it is almost American Slapsgiving...

How'd you know? That was supposed to be a secret holiday...

[N.tony]

I am kind of sad that in a video comparing voice chats you never even mentioned things relevant to gaming

• how much resources do the chat programs use, and in which situations can it affect game performance?
• how big is the overall lag of the transmission?

I don't think anyone would pick one program instead of the other based on the difference in sound quality that you demonstrated, whereas even small advantages in resource utilization/lag would be a deciding factor for a lot of people.

Not to join the chorus of criers, but the quantity of LMG employees does not seem to translate into better quality of the content...

[NGC5189]

I'm surprised you guys didn't go into detail on data usage. As a gamer without the newest or fastest system, I sometimes have to use nearly all of my computers processing power to run newer games. Because of this, I usually don't use Skype, because last time I used it, it was a resource hog of a program. But I haven't used TeamSpeak in almost a decade, and never used Mumble so I don't know how they compare.

[Fulu]

So me and my friends went from TS, Vent,mumble, back to vent, Skype "we stoped playing wow", Razer but it sucked so back to Skype. Then curse and discord we used both for about 6 month and just stuck with curse now twitch after to many people having problems with discord.

[Barrington]

oh hey im in this video at 2:35 and 7:59 

[tridy]

IS DISCORD REALLY THE BEST? - Voice Chat Platform Showdown

 

The best for what?

 

You should have said Voice Chat Platform for Gaming.

 

 

 

 

[tridy]

13 hours ago, Anjelllo said:

Yes, discord is the best. Don’t have to worry about being ddossed/Doxxed like skype and ts.

When was the last time you experienced that?

[AlTech]

8 hours ago, nicklmg said:

Good to know - though I truly doubt they're making a ton from Nitro. It's tucked away in a separate site page and, from what I can see, not advertised in any other page on their site. It also provides (from what I can see) zero benefit over the free tier, which is great for fostering community sentiment, and horrible for actually making money

It's got a practical benefit of letting users upload larger files at once. So there's that...

 

Nitro users can upload up to 50MB files versus 8MB for regular users.

 

Although neither is close to Skype's 150MB (it might even be 350MB at this point)  file upload.

8 hours ago, nicklmg said:

But it seems like the founders and associated VCs do have a pretty obvious way to make their money:

AKA "we will sell to someone someday, we're just waiting for the right offer to come along, and until then we're stockpiling detailed advertising profiles on every one of our users."

So, the question now becomes whether Discord Nitro users will suffer the same fate and if so then is it time to just stop using discord and use something else?

 

To be clear, I'm not paying for Nitro right now.

8 hours ago, nicklmg said:

I don't necessarily have a problem with them doing that.

I do. I've suspected that they've been collecting data and were selling to (or were going to sell to) advertisers for a while now .

 

The problem is that no other company seems to want to make a better product than Discord.

 

If there was a better product than discord for Voice and Video chat then I'd probably use that instead.

 

[AlwaysFSX]

11 hours ago, Touuqe said:

Anytime I used Discord, people all sound like they are talking through tin cans. TS just has better voice quality from my experience and I like to be able to host my own server and have full control over it.

Man, it's almost like Discord has the same thing..

 

 

I've never had an issue with voice quality because everyone I talk with doesn't have an Xbox mic and we're all in the same server region with decent internet. And that's with some really good mics too.

 

Tin cans? That's a PEBKAC issue.

[Tcrumpen]

I've not had any problems with Discord since i started using it, also i had no idea there were overlays; gonna make playing SMITE easier for me

[Tcrumpen]

20 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

Man, it's almost like Discord has the same thing..

 

 

I've never had an issue with voice quality because everyone I talk with doesn't have an Xbox mic and we're all in the same server region with decent internet. And that's with some really good mics too.

 

Tin cans? That's a PEBKAC issue.

PEBKAC or

 

PICNIC

[AlwaysFSX]

15 minutes ago, Tcrumpen said:

PEBKAC or

 

PICNIC

Basically. I've used TS, Mumble, Vent, etc. for years. Discord is really fantastic for its use-case.

[Anjelllo]

3 hours ago, tridy said:

When was the last time you experienced that?

Two words: Minecraft factions. I don’t play that anymore though, so I don’t have to worry about it.

[RamGuy]

It's a interesting comparison. But I miss some more details. Especially on Mumble and TeamSpeak. On Skype you can't really control anything... It's not all that great as you have zero control and its hard to create any kind of community going on Skype. Its just not aimed at this kind of use and the quality will bounce depending on Microsoft's load or whatever the Skype client might think you have as currently available bandwidth. Even on a 540/540mbit optical connection the quality will bounce for no apparent reason.

 

When it comes to Mumble and TeamSpeak you have a lot of configuration you can do on the server itself. I notice you change audio quality on the Mumble client, but you didn't show or mention anything about the server? The default settings on Murmur (Mumble Server) is capped below what you can set in the client so unless you have increased upon the default settings you will be limited by the server configuration. You can also enforce the use of Opus instead of Speex as a audio codec which sounds much better. Same goes for TeamSpeak, you can control the maximum supported audio bandwidth and what codecs that should be used on the server.

 

I'm not saying you did not change the server settings as well as the client settings, but as you didn't show us anything and you don't even mention any of it its impossible for us to tell whether you did or did not do it.

 

 

The most disappointing thing about the comparison is how you don't compare latency/delay at all. This is the most important thing besides audio quality, some would even argue its the most important thing as crystal clear audio doesn't really matter if you are struggling with latency and delay. I don't consider Skype to be a good Gaming VoIP solution to begin with, but this is the one area where Skype normally falls behind in my experience. Something it works okay, other times you might struggle with 1-3 seconds latency/delay which is hugely annoying and makes it rather useless if you ask me.

 

I have also noticed this with Discord. During peak hours both bandwidth (audio quality) and latency seems to be taking a noise-dive at times. This is why I normally tend to rely on self-hosted solutions like Mumble or TeamSpeak as we have much better control and when hosted on a high-speed optical connection on a dedicated server with low load you can be 99,99% certain you will have no loss of quality or noticeable latency problems. Discord is working for most of the time, but its so darn annoying when things become unstable so why not just use a self-hosted solution to begin with?

 

 

The benefits that Discord has is how the application feels much more modern. The UX-design of Mumble is abysmal, and TeamSpeak isn't that much better. Discord feels bloated, but its very easy to create your own server/channels and its easy to be subscribed to multiple servers/channels and be a part of different communities and its really easy to simply share a link with people in order for them to get onto your server so it feels much more modern. If only they allowed you to host your own server so you are not completely reliant on whatever mood the Discord servers are in for your audio quality and latency to be good.

[Mooshi]

If we could merge Discord with Telegram, that would be great.

[nicklmg]

9 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

It's got a practical benefit of letting users upload larger files at once. So there's that...

 

Nitro users can upload up to 50MB files versus 8MB for regular users.

I guess larger filesize could be a benefit depending on how you use Discord. If it's a hub for ALL communication in a group then yeah that's super cool. For my purposes that doesn't seem like a very compelling benefit, but to each their own!

9 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

So, the question now becomes whether Discord Nitro users will suffer the same fate and if so then is it time to just stop using discord and use something else?

 

To be clear, I'm not paying for Nitro right now.

There's nothing public-facing that leads me to believe otherwise (there's no benefit of Nitro listed as "We stop logging your data! Hooray!"), so the safe assumption is that they log EVERYONE's info, no matter the user level.

9 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

I do. I've suspected that they've been collecting data and were selling to (or were going to sell to) advertisers for a while now .

To be clear - in principle I do have an issue with selling user data.

 

What I don't have an issue with is them explicitly stating "if you use our platform we're going to log your information and we can transfer it to a purchaser in the event that Discord, the company, is purchased" and then doing just that.

 

There's nothing to suspect - they tell you right in their privacy policy that they log your info. They're very transparent about it all, which is a nice change from some. Doesn't make the end result any better, but the transparency is a plus in my books. This gives the user a very clear choice - use the platform and let them log and potentially transfer your info, or don't use the platform.

 

 

At the end of the day, they're a business. And as a business their end goal is "utilize our creation(s) to make money."

[D13H4RD]

I have one problem with Discord.

 

The iOS app.

 

I don't know why but it can never keep itself in memory. Every time you leave, it reloads completely from the beginning.
 

I also have other niggles like the Android app constantly uploading images twice when I switch from Wi-Fi to LTE.

 

I like Discord as a whole but I somehow feel that it shines as a VoIP service for games but stumbles as an IM service.

[Markmjb]

I'm using discord at the moment, but that's more convenience then something else. 

No longer a really active user, we just use it with a few friends for fun. 

I have spent like 10 years on IRC + Teamspeak 2/3 and it's only because that community no longer exist that I use discord now: It makes no sense to use 2 different programs to just share a few things with friends and talk to them.  If you can setup a default minecraft server, you can setup a teamspeak server: it's really not that hard. 

 

I wish you checked the delay on the voice servers: I wonder how much they differ from each other. 

[bomberblyat]

On 1.11.2017 at 10:02 PM, Trialhak said:

One question left standing is how each of the programs affect your performance in-game. I've always heard Skype tanks your fps more than the alternatives. I feel like I've seen you guys have a video about it before, or it could be some other channel, but I feel it should have earned a mention in the video when one of your examples were how the overlays were, not even mentioning how it performed.

1 best 3 worst fps for me

1.ts

2.discord (not much diffrence with ts)

3.skype