Being denied the ability to ask questions in Feast is miserable

[Commander_Justitia]

Why exactly? Give me one good reason why someone who'd simply offer polite advice and help their team with a strategy should also be muted. Go ahead, I'll wait.

One reason how absurd as it sounds is fairness. They think some players will have an advantage over others by telling their teammates strategies. This would rise the "skill" cap, when the mode tries its hardest to lower it.

[Nalien]

One reason how absurd as it sounds is fairness. They think some players will have an advantage over others by telling their teammates strategies. This would rise the "skill" cap, when the mode tries its hardest to lower it.

If that really is the reasoning SE holds, they seriously need to reconsider some things...

For starters, is the same not true of Quick Chat anyway? A player that uses the Countdown will have an advantage over someone who doesn't. A player that calls out Adrenaline Kits and Wolfs Heart is more likely to have the team secure them than the team that doesn't. Shouldn't Quick Chat then be removed to help lower the skill ceiling, if that's the idea? A new player has no idea of the "Hello" "Countdown" meta, and has no easy way of asking about such things, so what's really been achieved here? At least with chat there is a simpler avenue to close that skill cap but just asking about strategies. We still have a disparity in team strategies, but it's harder for new people to learn them... I'd say that's the opposite result to what was intended...

More importantly though, it's counter-productive. No doubt it lowered the skill ceiling, but why do you lower the skill ceiling to begin with? Almost always it's to make something more accessible, to help get new people playing it. A lack of chat doesn't achieve this, not really. It's easy to look at it and think "Oh, nobody is going to insult them when they lose, so they'll play more!", but that's really just looking at half the picture. By blanket muting everyone, you've also completely removed any encouragement to keep playing, no one can really offer any now after all. Personally, I don't remember a lot of the salt I experience in such modes, but the positive things people might say? Those are far more likely to stick with people, and far more likely to keep people playing. Robbing Feast of chat does not encourage new people to play the mode, I don't even think you can say it solves the toxicity that might deter them either, because that just changed form. People can still be toxic, but it is much harder to be helpful and encouraging, and that does not help make Feast more accessible. A sense of community is far more beneficial to keeping new players around, but it's very hard to have that when everyone is muted...

It's very much a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water...

[Gallus]

You are making a big deal out of the chat when in my opinion it isn't.

The only instance where you might use the chat is before the match begins. Given the frenetic and heated nature of this mode, typing in the middle of a battle to tell something very specific to one of your teammates will most likely make things worse, not better. You have direct macros with a sound to give specific instructions and you have a good bunch of them.

Chatting in the middle of a match was 99% of the times used in the past to bash or harass someone, not to bring constructive feedback (which should always be saved after the match finishes, you are not going to help anybody by writing a wall of text while the enemy team is rampaging you).

I never said removing the chat was the ultimate panacea to solve toxicity btw, all I suggested is that SE probably thought that, given the situation and how insanely rude people were, the removal of the chat was the lesser evil here.

[Hydrium]

It's generally the worst players speaking up in PVP to berate others, once chat is removed they become distressed because they know they no longer have the ability to deflect attention away from their own subpar play and it must stand on it's own without outside bias trying to cover it up.