A recent rant by a member of the new Twitch Safety Council colloquially known as Twitch Deer Girl ragging on voice chat in video games being an “unfair advantage” as well as being “bad for minorities” exploded recently on the interwebs. Now, this interested me but not enough to make a post on it… until I heard her mention Heroes of the Storm. Fatal mistake.
Here’s a bit of background : I was #1 support on Heroes of the Storm for over three months on the Americas server, as well as #14 overall. I was the only support player in the entire top 200.
This is because Heroes of the Storm puts support characters where you would expect them : to support. Major plays are hard to make as a support, which does leave you open to doing another crucial role – coordinating the team and leading it.
I managed to climb the ladder because I was excessively good at a few characters, but when those characters were nerfed to the ground alongside the entire support position, I was left at the mercy of how much my team would listen to me.
This is fine in most games, namely Dota, where a lot of support players find great success in the upper echelons of the game (I myself hit top 200-400 for a good amount of time); League of Legends, Overwatch, Valorant, and more.
What most of those games DO feature however, is one key thing : voice chat. The ability to talk to your team while leaving your hands free to move around and react. Because in competitive games, the ability to be able to react within fractions of a second makes the entire difference. Most of these games give players the ability to “ping” parts of the map. But this is not enough. Telling your allies to “attack” somewhere is not enough context.
Being a leader, being a coordinator means telling your friends to watch out because someone’s in a bush, someone’s hiding somewhere, there’s no one on the map, meaning the other team is performing an objective or are going to kill someone WITHIN SECONDS. And I mean that. Many times I have saved and have been saved based on just a one or two or three second warning, and it changed the outcome of the game entirely. It’s important. It’s a key factor.
“Deer girl” says that voice chat leaves minorities disproportionally open to abuse. Maybe it does. But everyone gets “abused” online for how they sound, because there is no other context when someone talks other than how silly they sound or if they speak the language badly or so on. That doesn’t prevent you from participating in voice chat, it doesn’t prevent you from being a leader and being useful. The key is in the name : COMPETITIVE TEAM games. These are not solitaire, they are not one-on-one competitive games, they are games where you are REQUIRED to take part in the societal aspect of the game, for the next ten, twenty, thirty, sixty minutes. No one forced you to play the game, and voice chat is very much a necessary bundle package.
Heroes of the Storm did not come with voice chat, and it was a factor in rendering Heroes of the Storm an annoying, unfun mess of a game and lead to the project being terminated. I lost my ranking because there was no voice chat (and because of awful character balancing decisions).