Originally Posted by
Tziva
As someone who has been raid leader for many pugs (albeit not in awhile), a regular team, and as someone who pugs a lot, this issue has a lot of sides to it.
There are a lot of fights that absolutely can be winged and don't require voice calls if people know the fights and are good at watching timers. There are also a lot of fights that highly benefit from the ability to quickly communicate, either due to their mechanics or to help adapt when things don't go as planned. I think requiring comms for the latter is fine, and requesting it for the former is okay, but I also think it's okay if people don't want to. There will occasionally be issues from it, but overall it should largely go fine.
I have a very mixed relationship with voice comms. Yes, it is extremely useful in raid and higher keystones, and I cannot overstate its value in many contexts. However, I have a lot of problems with its overuse. I find chatting distracting, I find overcalling stuff tends to make me tune out, and nothing grates on me more than people talking over each other. I also rely very heavily on audio cues for things, and people talking can make those harder to hear. And, frankly, some times I just don't want to deal with the social dynamics and awkwardness of using voice with a bunch of strangers who I might find obnoxious or inappropriate. Yes, that is a me problem, but it is a problem nonetheless. A lot of groups absolutely use voice for more than bare bones raid callouts, even if they promise that is the only purpose, which means the negatives far outweigh the positives for me.
Unless I'm pugging a challenging boss, I will specifically look for raid listings that aren't requiring voice chat. If I join a raid and then they tell me I need to be in voice chat (but didn't put it in the listing), I would absolutely be the person that says "I know the fights, I don't need it." I would probably leave if they pushed on it. [note: if it's required, please fucking put it in the listing] Buuuut I also probably would be a lot less likely to PuG the kind of bosses where voice chat is borderline essential because those almost always go very poorly and you just end up in a cycle of wipe > spend 15minutes replacing the people that left > repeat, getting very few attempts in in a very large amount of time.
That said, after all that: when I led regular weekly PuGs, we used voice comms. I would have probably been okay with one of the regular attendees not using voice, but would have required it from the randoms. So :shrug: