Huddle mode for voice chat in game lobbies.

[FlatEarthCreationist]

The voice chat in game lobbies can get crazy with people socializing and captains trying to organize their crews.
How about a huddle mode where a captain or team can start a huddle. If you join the huddle you only hear and speak into the channel for that huddle. Anyone in a huddle will be marked as such so the rest of the lobby can see that those players won't hear what they're saying.
It could be as simple as a button a ship captain hits to switch his crew to a crew channel only, or it could be done with players individually joining or leaving a huddle.

[Captain Smollett]

That's a really cool idea, I wonder how hard it would be to implement.

Currently you can achieve half the functionality of that by starting a party with your team and using "z" (party) chat.  You won't be able to block out the lobby without individually blocking players but you can have a private conversation with this method.

[HamsterIV]

I like this. Normally I give crew instructions in text so that I won't clutter lobby audio with chat only meant for 1/4 the people. I only give crew instructions verbally when a crew member has not complied.

[treseritops]

This could probably just repurpose the "C" button for in lobby. Captain chat in game, crew chat in the lobby?

[geggis]

I like your idea treseritops but that wouldn't solve the issue of it getting too noisy to communicate with your team as I suspect a lot of people will just default to default chat. A huddle mode would presumably mute everyone else bar your own crew and show to the other teams that you're huddled. Perhaps the lobby chat should be changed entirely to different huddle modes? That would be very intuitive:

• So you have lobby chat at the top level, this is when you're 'unhuddled'. When you press chat unhuddled you talk to everyone else who is unhuddled. (This is most likely for when you're practically ready)
• When you engage team huddle, your chat is restricted to your team and only heard by people in team huddle.
• When you engage crew huddle, your chat is restricted to your crew and only heard by people in crew huddle.

Each huddle has a colour so everyone in the lobby can see who's in what huddle talking so there's an incentive for people to get in (or out) of a huddle to hear what's going on. You could have three push to talk keys for each of these but that wouldn't solve the issue of shutting out chatter so these huddle modes or channels act as a sort of filter. Type chatting keeps the noise low but sometimes it can be pushed up the chat history quickly if a few people are conversing there. This huddle/channel idea would work really well in my opinion so good job FlatEarthCreationist!

[geggis]

And while we're at it, why don't we have a few extra tabs for text chat in the lobby to make a bit more sense of all that chatter? Global (everyone outside the lobby), Match (everyone in a lobby), Team, Crew and Party. After playing Guild Wars 2 I miss that sort of organisation in the bottom left.

[Van Manfred]

Just brainstorming here, but what about a "War Room" that would be accessed with a button beside the ship's name in the lobby, that one can join as long as he is on the crew. It would lead to something like the "create crew" screen, and cut all outside vox until one gets back to the lobby.

And since we can dream, why not make the "War Room" an actual virtual place, a salon or workshop where avatars would be free to "interact" as if on the deck of a ship?     IMO that would also be a good place to test out connections.

[NoWuffo]

My crew can normally get around this because we're all in TS together, but it's still quite frustrating when you have a full lobby trying to figure out who's bringing what, and you can't hear your own teammates. I have even gone in and muted GoI while I figure out what's going on in TeamSpeak. It would be nice to toggle even just the opponent's voice chat, or just my own ship's voice chat. The only problem is this might be abused.

In the end, I normally just use the text crew-chat and for the especially stubborn gunner who I'm trying to tell to go engi, a PM normally works pretty well since it pops up on their screen.

[Captain Rico]

*cough* invite to party *cough*