Suddenly, a routine night online turns into an impromptu family reunion. The thing I find most envious about Cundiff and Brown's relationship with their TeamSpeak server are the once-in-a-blue-moon occasions when someone they used to play with logs back on. Some of them have really good careers now," he says. I've seen people grow from high school students, all the way to college students. "I've been around this TeamSpeak for four or five years. These connections are about tradition, not better sound quality or stability.Īnother Syndicate of Gaming regular, 30-year-old Chris Brown, feels the same. It's the same logic I rely on when I want to believe that my hairbrained high-school mischief was unique, or charming, or part of my own social development. Whereas with Discord, you're in a train station."īroadly, that's an adage I believe a Vent server as a fiefdom, and we its loyal citizens. When you go into a server, you're in a cozy room. "On TeamSpeak it feels a little more private experience, you have to actually input the address of where you want to go. "I think the reason I don't like Discord is that it feels so 'connected.' You have all these tabs on the side, all these notifications-you can jump between any of those servers in a second," he explains. However, there is one truth he stands by: TeamSpeak, by its nature, is a more intimate platform than Discord. His dedication to TeamSpeak is emotional, personal, and practical-a semblance of allegiances all meshed into one. It goes without saying that this server is not nearly as populated as it once was, but despite that, Cundiff has maintained a solid group of friends that, like him, have stuck around the rooms as the years have piled on. Over the course of that time he's established ironclad friendships through the kinship of headshots and Ragnaros kills, and he's watched those same friendships slowly disappear into the internet ether. This server is where he grew up.Ĭundiff tells me that the server has existed, in various incarnations, for about five years. I'm welcomed here by Austin Cundiff, who is 24 and lives outside of Chicago. There are, of course, active Rainbow Six Siege and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds lobbies, proof that the channel is not in complete disrepair, as well as the trademark password-protected VIP rooms that are regulared by self-proclaimed officers and anyone lucky enough to be friends with them. A litany of miscellaneous, homespun chatrooms dot the server, each with funny, pithy names-Cougar's Cavern, Duck's Sniper Nest-representing the calcified fossils of long-dead inside jokes canonized by ancestors who don't log on anymore. The Syndicate of Gamers TeamSpeak server is instantly nostalgic for anyone who grew up on VoIP. When someone they used to play with logs back on, suddenly a routine night online turns into an impromptu family reunion. Before long, a user sent a message to my inbox containing a TeamSpeak server and password. So I composed a post on the PC Gaming subreddit looking for any grognards who haven't made the switch. Those who remain committed to their rickety VoIP modules are fighting a losing battle, but I still wanted to hear them out. Today Discord hosts nearly 100 million users, and seems to be rapidly building a monopoly in the games industry. When I interviewed Discord's CEO Jason Citron last year, he told me how he grew up playing games with his friends on Vent, and specifically wanted to create a service that ensured you never had to remember an IP address ever again. Together this triptych represents the old guard of videogame voice chat, the bulwark standing against the Discord generation, with its sleek design and seamless servers.
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