“I know the fight I don’t need Discord”

[Jester Joe]

Victim mentality is something you should try and fix

If the first thing you have to say to someone that's worried about being creeped on (which usually means they've had to deal with it before) is start telling them to change, that's victim blaming.

[Ealyssa]

So you find it acceptable if someone joins and mutes themselves and everyone in the discord and it's not at all equal to not joining? that's hilarious.

Listening or not listening the raid leader is actually not the same, yes...

Nobody ask you to get social. They ask you to listen to raid calls.

[Drusin]

communication is key. Target swaps, dodges, healing CDs, doesn’t matter if a player has killed a few twelve times, if they want to do it the current one they need to be working with the team.

Yep, you aren't in discord to get the fight explained to you you're there to hear any important callouts.

[Athorha]

I'll typically join the voice com, but if the raid lead speaks with hesitation and its clear they just wanted voice coms as a formality rather than actually act as a raid leader who improves their players I'll bounce when they I hear the first "uhhh what should we do durrr"... groups like that are a typical headache and are laughable when they also require achievements.

[Drusin]

Also the hole girl/creep thing; I hope it just blown out of proportion

but I guess it aint

It depends on what proportions you've been hearing lol. Do women get creeped on on social media (discord)? Yes.
Is it 100% of women every single time they get online? No.

The first part of your quote doesn't have to be false in order for the second to be true, but it all depends on what you mean.

[Garymorilix]

Eh, there's flaws in that logic, the main one being people learn/respond differently. As a slight example, before I got eye surgery my eyesight was terrible, and I ended up learning and absorbing stuff WAY better when I heard it or when it was spoken. While I had a physical issue that caused me to lean this way, for others it's naturally this way. It wasn't that rare even in my hardcore raiding days where I was the minority in my raids with having game sound on, because I could hear things happening before I could visually process it. All my custom-made weakauras had custom sounds because I would respond faster to hearing a signal/command than seeing it.

In this respect, Discord can be used as a tool for those that respond better to audio cues. This can be especially true when it comes to learning fights, because trying to process what's visually going on while reading other things (such as raid warnings, chat, etc.) is a lot harder than people think. There's even been studies done on the people who swear up and down that they can multitask several things at once, and it turns out it's vary rarely the case... it's more akin to sequential processing, where you have to keep jumping to each thing individually and end up not absorbing a lot of information in the process (basically, it's a sort of information blindness... i.e. you think you're multitasking well because you don't notice all the information you aren't absorbing).

If you've been raiding long enough at any level, included top 50-100 raiding, it's extremely obvious that everyone learns at different speeds and with different methods. If you watch closely enough, you can eventually start picking out people in the RWF that learn a lot slower or differently than their counterparts. That slow learner may still be better than your average raider, the point is that there's going to be a disparity between raiders at any skill level. Heck, I'd say this is one of the main reasons people guild hop: they recognize that they potentially learn a lot faster than their current guild as a whole or some members, and the individual is frustrated because they're already mindless doing the fight while others learn. However, what's commonly misconstrued is that the slower learners are just bad... but it's similar to rigid school education systems: sometimes the individual are only taught one way to do things, or are not exposed to a learning process that fits them.

One of my favorite jobs in one of my hardcore raiding guilds was being the guy who found out why people were screwing up and how to fix it. Like who I'm quoting, many people have a preconceived notion based upon their perspective and automatically discount or throw out people based upon it. I guess it helps that the guild leader was a doctor who was used to dealing with patients with different strengths/weaknesses, as I haven't seen this sort of role in many other guilds. However, sometimes just a little correction or guidance makes all the difference. You'd be amazed at how many people I've 'rehabilitated' in WoW raiding by just creating custom weakauras based upon customized sound cues, said individuals going from slow/mediocre to reliable or even amazing. Again, not everyone learns or efficiently processes information the same way, and sometimes a little understanding and investigation goes a long way towards getting people to improve.

As a slight aside, Blizz has actually gotten better over the years adding audio cues to the encounters to let you know when things happen... but most people probably haven't even noticed this. I can't remember the specific encounter, but I remember people were struggling because the bossmods were inaccurate (as were the weakauras since there was no reliable trigger) for a certain mechanic... but I always called it out over Discord correctly, which confused the hell out of people. When asked how I did it, I told them straight-up that Blizz had put in an audio cue for when it happens, but most people had their game sound turned off or just tuned out anything audio-related. While this didn't lead to a rash movement towards listening for the cue for most of the raiders (some did pick up on it and learned faster), I did become the person that did all the call-outs exactly in Discord because my auditory-based way of raiding was superior than the visual option.

As I said in my post, I assume OP is talking about Heroic (or below) level pugging.

Bringing World First races and hardcore guild-based mythic raiding into this is useless. Those are done with everyone on voice comms by default.

You also didn't address the fact that there are literally no mechanics in-game that would require anyone to use voice comms (outside of Mekkatorque HC in BfA).
Literally everything can be handled by using:
-DBM
-In-game markers
-Occasional raid warning call-out (this is rather unnecessary only being used to wake up the sheep who are afk doing their rotation)

It doesn't matter how fast or slow learner you are, there is not much to learn.
You watch a video on a HC boss once, you know 70% of the fight. You wipe once or twice seeing the mechanic and you are 100% prepped. From that point onward there is nothing to learn. You've seen everything. If you still need someone to hold your hand on voice comms then you are not pug material, find a guild that holds your hand.

Nobody said guilds and high-end raiders shouldn't use voice.
Pugs don't need to use voice at all. There is nothing you need voice for. Do the established mechanics as told on repeat and done, you can play by yourself.

[Twdft]

Also the hole girl/creep thing; I hope it just blown out of proportion, but I guess it aint since it keeps being brought up like some dead old meme.

Yeah, ask any woman you know playing online games with voice and I'd wager you get anecdotes of being creeped on from about... 100% of them.

Discord also has this little feature of seeing all discords you and another player are both in, which could be used to creep even more after that raid. Solution: if you are required to join a random discord to pug do it in a browser with a throwaway nick name.

[Palapop]

So you find it acceptable if someone joins and mutes themselves and everyone in the discord and it's not at all equal to not joining? that's hilarious.

Own microphone? Ok.
Everyone else? Not ok.
But if you REALLY know everything that well, then just join discord and mute everyone for your own sake. But then you risk of being removed for the grp if you fail the call.

[Unlimited Power]

Granted I only ever raid normal and heroic, and I start by learning fights with a prearranged discord community, but I've had no need for discord in the pugs I joined afterwards.

[dragonflight10]

And in exhibit A and B of victim blaming comes two posts that leap to conclusions and make assumptions to try to push the idea that it's the person's fault for being creeped on, without knowing literally anything about the situations or reasoning why it was said!

They are aware 100% that it's not the victim fault, they are just saying that there are creeps out there and this is one of the best ways to avoid them

[Jester Joe]

They are aware 100% that it's not the victim fault, they are just saying that there are creeps out there and this is one of the best ways to avoid them

One of the best ways to avoid them would be found in other posts. I myself gave a few ways to manage random DMs from strangers on Discord, along with others suggesting throwaway accounts just for pugging.

Telling them to "get over it" and to "not announce themselves" isn't advice, that's blame.

[Makorus]

As someone who kinda dabbles into raid leading now, people without mics or people who don't even join Discord on certain fights are the bane of my existence.

The amount of times we wiped on bosses like Fatescribe because it's incredibly hard to call out that you need someone else on a rune because you aren't willing to talk is incredible.

[Eli85]

In my 15+ years of raid leading (mostly pugs) I have consistently had the most problems with anyone who says this. They are Always the first to rage quit.

Generally my groups have a couple different skill levels of players, and the groups are usually competent but not completely-overpowering-the-fight-competent.

It’s frustrating because I hate to turn down qualified players but there’s so many fights where communication is key. Target swaps, dodges, healing CDs, doesn’t matter if a player has killed a few twelve times, if they want to do it the current one they need to be working with the team.

There’s only one or two other groups of players I’ve had as much trouble with. I’m not going to mention them by name, but they weren’t an issue when I was fighting Ragnaros in vanilla.

You have this wrong, at least for the raid fights you would PUG (normal / heroic). Any player who needs verbal communications for target swaps, dodging avoidable damage, popping healing CDs, they're ... subpar players at best. Good players do not need those communication cues. It is incredibly rare for a normal / heroic fight to require verbal communication to clear.

On a personal level, I won't join a random groups voice chat for normal and heroic; and if I do, I just mute Discord entirely. I'd rather avoid the unnecessary chatter from people I'll never interact with again, and I never make a muck of things because I didn't have some guy in my ear telling me when to pop Tranq. I know when it needs to be popped, ordinarily because it would be established before the pull; and if things are going really south, I don't need to wait for someone else to tell me to save the raid group from a wipe.

Voice chat, in PvE terms, really just makes strategy discussion more convenient, that's it. Unless you're pushing the world first race, if you feel the need for rapid, instantaneous communication, you have larger issues to sort out than PUG players not wanting to join your Discord chat.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

If you are doing content with people you have never met, I would not be expecting them to join voice communications.
There are a dozen reasons why, but for me on the other side, its an easy decision.
I am not willing to tolerate the often no-rules landscape that comes with pure pug voice coms.
Between racism, sexism and overall rudeness, to open mics and absurd noises.
These things would distract me to no end, and I would just be playing worse if I was trying to figure out what social dynamics were at work as well as what mechanics were occuring.

At the end of the day though, when I pug keys, almost nothing productive ever gets said in voice coms. If its early in the expansion and things need to be explained to people, then sure. But late like this, the only thing anyone would actually talk about is super minor optimizations that just aren't worth my time dealing with.
The most productive thing that gets said is interrupting order, and 9 times out of 10, you can hash this out in text chat just as easily.

I do recognize even high keys are much easier to organize than even Heroic raiding, but at this point, people who pug just want to chill out and see what they can get done.
If not, they would be looking for a raiding guild.

[Th3Scourge]

I really can't stand when people are adamant on using discord for relatively trivial content.

No, I don't want to join voice chat with 4-29 other randoms to do some heroic Lihuvium kill or a 20+ key or some shit. Or even worse when people try to make you use discord for like 1600's arena matches

On the rare occasion I might join a pug key where the group is oceanic/Aus and they say 'we're hanging out in disc is you wanna join' then send a link, I will generally oblige as the expectation is already set that they're not making it out to be some mandatory thing that some tryhard can bark orders at 4 other members and rage out when someone dies

[Dalinos]

I really can't stand when people are adamant on using discord for relatively trivial content.

No, I don't want to join voice chat with 4-29 other randoms to do some heroic Lihuvium kill or a 20+ key or some shit. Or even worse when people try to make you use discord for like 1600's arena matches

On the rare occasion I might join a pug key where the group is oceanic/Aus and they say 'we're hanging out in disc is you wanna join' then send a link, I will generally oblige as the expectation is already set that they're not making it out to be some mandatory thing that some tryhard can bark orders at 4 other members and rage out when someone dies

This specific comment shows me that this whole discussion is heavily influenced by culture. Allow me to elaborate.

Where I come from, the Internet Cafe scene was HUGE from the 1990's up until COVID hit. We're talking hundreds of internet cafes in my country's capital alone. In these places, you learn from a VERY early age to game on the PC while talking at the same time to the people who are next to you/opposite you. 5v5 LAN DOTA matches, Counterstrike, 2v2 Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne and many, many other LAN games have been played were instantaneous vocal communication is your baseline DEFAULT option. Because your friends/teammates are literally sitting next to you/opposite you.

When WoW was released and everyone started playing it, people were leveling/questing/dungeoning together while talking and discussing shit. I kid you not, I was about 13yrs old at the time, with my lvl 8 night elf druid, watching a group of 20-year old University students at around the mid-30's doing Scarlet Monastery. They were actively talking about EVERYTHING that they did, because they were discovering the game at the same time.

For most Greeks like myself, video-gaming was ALWAYS, ALWAYS a social activity. Never a solitary activity. From the old Playstation 1/Nintendo 64 days, where we'd gather at 1 persons' house and play Tekken 3, This is Football, Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat, to the 2000's where we went to Internet Cafes to play Age of Mythology and Warcraft 3, to the early 2010s when League of Legends was released, to up until COVID lockdowns made so many internet cafes go out of business. Video-Gaming for me and my country was always a group activity.

This is in stark contrast to countries like Sweden, where it's cold 90% of the time and snowing 50% of the time, where video-gaming is what you do when you're home alone and can't go out to have a beer with your mates.

As a result, it's natural that some cultures have a pre-disposition to be all about voice-chat, while others have a pre-disposition to be completely baffled and astonished by people requiring voice chat. Personally, I literally can't play online team-games without voice chat. It's how I've been gaming on the PC since I was 8 years old.

[FelPlague]

I did it all the time because once you know the fights like the back of your hand, no amount of raid comms is going to add anything further other than the annoying loud clicks of keyboards and mice because some dumbass doesn't know what a hot mic is.

now this is untrue, there is stuff like calls that need ot be made, but even then i will do this when its fights that dont have any of those calls, or calls are non-consequential.

[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:

[cuafpr]

I used to give people 1 pull to prove they knew the fights without voice comms then make them join or replace. Now as a casual / LFR hero it doesn't matter. Based on the harassment standpoint perhaps raids should be designed around NOT using voice coms at all though if it would help things.

[Th3Scourge]

This specific comment shows me that this whole discussion is heavily influenced by culture. Allow me to elaborate.

Where I come from, the Internet Cafe scene was HUGE from the 1990's up until COVID hit. We're talking hundreds of internet cafes in my country's capital alone. In these places, you learn from a VERY early age to game on the PC while talking at the same time to the people who are next to you/opposite you. 5v5 LAN DOTA matches, Counterstrike, 2v2 Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne and many, many other LAN games have been played were instantaneous vocal communication is your baseline DEFAULT option. Because your friends/teammates are literally sitting next to you/opposite you.

When WoW was released and everyone started playing it, people were leveling/questing/dungeoning together while talking and discussing shit. I kid you not, I was about 13yrs old at the time, with my lvl 8 night elf druid, watching a group of 20-year old University students at around the mid-30's doing Scarlet Monastery. They were actively talking about EVERYTHING that they did, because they were discovering the game at the same time.

For most Greeks like myself, video-gaming was ALWAYS, ALWAYS a social activity. Never a solitary activity. From the old Playstation 1/Nintendo 64 days, where we'd gather at 1 persons' house and play Tekken 3, This is Football, Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat, to the 2000's where we went to Internet Cafes to play Age of Mythology and Warcraft 3, to the early 2010s when League of Legends was released, to up until COVID lockdowns made so many internet cafes go out of business. Video-Gaming for me and my country was always a group activity.

This is in stark contrast to countries like Sweden, where it's cold 90% of the time and snowing 50% of the time, where video-gaming is what you do when you're home alone and can't go out to have a beer with your mates.

As a result, it's natural that some cultures have a pre-disposition to be all about voice-chat, while others have a pre-disposition to be completely baffled and astonished by people requiring voice chat. Personally, I literally can't play online team-games without voice chat. It's how I've been gaming on the PC since I was 8 years old.

No I don't thnk so

I've done the LAN days, done the days when we used to gather at friends houses with out PCs and consoles, play counter strike and starcraft co-op, been to the internet cafes in the days of WC3 and vanilla wow when I had a dial up connection. Voice comms was a novelty back in the day and many people were keen to get on with their shitty mics. Those days are gone

Nowadays, I'm not interested in connecting with people I don't know over voice chat. Gaming isn't the niche it once was and everyone was excited by meeting or talking to other like-minded people in a video game. I'm generally only OK being in voice chat with people I know and most of the time I'm playing games, I'm usually listening to some music or a podcast or something, and I'm really not interested in stopping what I'm doing so someone can try to optimise a +15 key.