Pretty much if someone's being an annoying [censored] and I don't have the time to mute the person I plug in my headset so it's not coming through my TV and turn the headset volume all the way down. Works like a charm.

If it's on Team Fortress 2, which is pretty much the only multiplayer PC game I play, I just mute the person during respawn time next time I die. If someone wants to prove GIFT theory, that's their choice, but I'm not going to rise to it by giving a response.

I guess it depends on what the person is used to.

None of the old online FPS games I played in the late 90s / early 2000s had voice chat built into public servers. If you wanted to voice chat, you used ventrilo or team speak.

It's only in [censored] console FPS games and much newer PC FPS games that i've experienced built in voice chat... and I don't like it.

People who say there should be any voice chat at all are just letting the 13 year old mic spammers win. I can see if you're annoyed by that, but if your reasoning for not have any is b/c YOU don't think it's useful or fun unless your with friends or something......well, who are you to say what other ppl enjoy?

Indeed. My previous gaming was done in things they used to call ark..ar...oh yeah, arcades back in the 80's. Think a kid mic spamming is bad? Try listing to 30+ kids screaming, yelling, running around like mad people. There is no mute!

Similar here. With the addition that the circles we move in IRL, I never meet any "gamers." Hubs knows a couple coworkers who occasionally play some xbox stuff I think, that's about it. None of my family are gamers either. Heck most of my family barely knows how to use a computer, lol. So the internet is where I've met people who play/talk about games. Some of the ppl I've met online I've known for 12+ years now. Kinda cool.

I think it's pompous the presumption is that a person who doesn't have an affinity for voice chat believes everyone is going to be annoying. As you can see I pointed out obvious straw man terminology.

I used to Skype and TS/Vent with people in old MMO's I played and while there were a couple people worth talking to, most people either acted mildly stupid, their mics were set to ridiculous levels or were inaudible due to using a horrible mic, or were simply not interesting enough to keep talking to. It's quite a bit like the real world, to be honest, people form their cliques, I don't see the problem, or why this notion of some obviously small minority of people gains so much straw man worthy attention.

Chuck E Cheese :yuk:

Not really. The basic argument for the ones that don't like voice chat is b/c they automatically "know" there will be annoying ppl in every match. How do I know this? B/c those ppl don't use voice chat at all.

My conclusion is only logical with the attitude given towards voice chat.

i wish more people used their mics, more than half of the time no one has them, or you hear all of one word from them. Personally i enjoyed some of the different accents you can hear, granted a few of the people on it have horrible squeky/shouty voices, but thats what the volume is for

Lucky you.

Yeah, I don't own a dedicated mic at all. Never have. No reason to.

As for voices... only recent experience I have is with the ME3 multiplayer. Rarely hear anyone speak, and when I do, it's a short comment that I can't understand because it's garbled.

Why is trash talk the "point" of online gaming? I Play online gaming because it's generally a more immersive experience. Note that I"m referring specifically to MMOs and the like, I despise any and all FPS games(just really dislike the genre to be honest). I don't want to trash talk or be trash talked to, it just pisses me off and makes me want to reach through my screen, into their room and smack some sense into them. There is no point to Trash talk. It's not funny, it's not engaging, it's not rewarding, it's not fun, it's not cool, it's not anything positive. It is however, demeaning, immature, childish and over-all stupid. On top of that, it's what is holding back gamers as being an actual recognized culture in the world at large, because when people trash talk constantly, it makes people take us a lot less seriously.

edit: To address the original question: I dislike mic chat. I've never used it, and never plan on ever touching it. For one thing, I don't do online gaming on a console. For another, if I wanted to hear other people talk, I'd be out in the real world doing something with friends. I play games to relax, and I can't relax while listening to random peoples pvssyr, even if it's fairly sane, normal pvssyr.

I figure this a reason to use the mic when talking to strangers, if it doesn't annoy them then it's going to amuse them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8BZJ3r3l7I&feature=plcp&context=C40ab67bVDvjVQa1PpcFNGYQ4Nnv7agoV70vztKixQ0iDbjhDNkcc%3D the other day is a great example of swearing and lolz (I think that's the right video, I should randomly outburst somewhere in the middle)

With a mic on though I seem to outburst a lot rather than make conversation compared to without a mic where I just sit in silence and play with maybe the odd grumble or kick. I need an audience to vent

I've never been one for chatting on the PC. I never chime in unless there's already people talking, and even then I rarely do. Maybe it's because I have a desktop mic that requires me to lean over my keyboard to speak into it clearly.

The only reason that I even have a PC mic is that I found one in my basemant a few years ago. In fact, that's where I got a lot of my non-tower stuff. My keyboard is an old Dell keyboard that I scrounged up, my mouse was, before I replaced it, an old Microsoft mouse, my sound system is actually an "Audio Controller" that I have everything that produces sound hooked into, and my speakers are two huge Pioneers that just so happened to be with it at the time.

Back in my 360 days I would talk, but not unless there was already a conversation going on. Sometimes you would have nice conversations about the game, actually helpful warnings about enemy positions, or simply someone saying something interesting. Other times you'd just have twelve year olds screaming at you, telling you that you were a "noob" or a "scrub". For the most part you can ignore or mute them, but on the rare times that they actually were better than I was, I couldn't help but be a little pissed at the bastards.

I really hate public in-game VOIP. I'm not going to use voice chat outside of a skype call or teamspeak/mumble server with people I know, and I don't want to listen to random people talking in-game either. So, voice-chat = great, public in-game voice chat = not great.