Mumble's channel system allows nesting channels, in addition to that, each channel allows specific access control list that could be both inherited from top-level channel or be inherited to a lower-level one. In addition to that it has the possibility of creating groups of users to whom the permission applies. It's really sophisticated. Discord has only role-based rooms, but nothing hierarchical.
I don't have any experience with gaming so this is a bit hard for me to understand. Are nested channels used as a way of grouping channels in a hierarchy in the UI? Or does the hierarchy affect what people hear? In the latter case, I'm imagining something like: "Everyone in subchannel can hear everything said in parent channel, but not vice versa".
The hierarchy can be set up to affect what people hear, and where they can speak. This is invaluable when you need to coordinate dozens or hundreds of players in real time. You can set up overlapping rooms where team leads hear their team member's voice chatter and their superior's voice chatter, and have the option of communicating in either direction. I usually had the two side buttons on my mouse set to push-to-talk, one that for talking up the hierarchy, one for talking downward. The exact setup everyone uses varies, but at minimum you can have a room for higher-level voice chat among team leads, while each lowest-level team is isolated to their own channel and can focus on the tasks given to them by their team lead. Mumble is also flexible enough that you don't need to strictly adhere to a hierarchy, you can have your lower-level players also be able to communicated laterally to groups of specialists who are handling specific support tasks.
This is all a difficult communication problem, but it's doubly difficult because decisions need to propagate up and down your communication hierarchy in seconds. Being able to manage this level of communication without it being a hopeless clusterfuck is a defining feature of effective organizations of players.
Correct. In example, you've got your "logisitics" wing; in this context that's your healers. A commander ("logi-FC") within the channel issues orders to the sub-channel members, and no one outside the channel hears that. All members can still hear the parent channel.
In fights with 20-50 on each side particularly, it's really something to have the "pulse of the fight" because as a healer you can tell how well that's going.
A mumble server can be hosted with fairly low requirements if you're an org with less than 50 members in voice comms, and it's pretty embarrassing that a seemingly large majority of corporations can't even get 5 people into a call without an act of congress when gamers have tools like this so well explored.
That really sounds like an indispensible feature. Is Mumble the only voice chat system that provides this kind of hierarchical linking of channels, or is it available on other systems as well?
If it's not available on, say, Discord, why is that? Do people just somehow make do without it? Or is there some other compensating feature?
Discord only allows you to be a membere of one channel at a time.
It is not an uncommon set-up for fleets to have the important people have their own channel talking about secret stuff and another one for the rest of the fleet.
Then the ones from the secret channel have two buttons set up, one to talk just to them and one to talk with the entire fleet.
Discord is all about being dead simple, and nested channels necessarily require more configuration complexity on both the server and client.
So, while the feature is a must-have for a small subset of users, it's probably not seen as being worth the trouble when just supporting several flat channels is more than enough for the 99% of Discord's potential user base.
I'd still hope they at least add some kind of "broadcast to several channels" option, since that seems like the simplest version that would still be useful, but I don't really expect it.
It's a niche, rather than indispensable feature - most games don't require dozens of people to voice-communicate in real time. Eve is a bit of a holdover but the trend has been away from giant mobs of chattering users. Apex Legends (a popular new multiplayer game) is getting a lot of praise for reducing the need for teammates to actually talk to each other to about zero.
In large eve fleets, it's not a chattering mob, you couldn't run things if it's like that. Things are normally quite terse with a small number of people, scouts, FCs, logi talking while most people get on with the important business of pressing F1.
More seriously, my point was not (heaven help me) that Eve players are disorganized but that 'massive raid requiring structured multi-party voice comms' is not a common problem gamers in the current market find themselves needing to solve.
Sorry, missed the point, I see what you mean now. Kinda sad in a way. I love the massive fleet aspect of eve. Even tho TiDi fights can be pretty awful, they're amazing in their own way.
