Look, I really like the ability to quickly turn off voice chat in a given lobby.

But game companies took advice like this to heart during the PS4/Xbox One era and it was a mistake. Everyone's on party chat or they don't have a mic on. The network effect means everyone not in a party gives up trying to ask if anyone has a mic, so nobody even tries to use the mic anymore. Just impossible to communicate with anyone.

I remember being stoked for Battlefield 4, which I bought right after they made a big update that fixed it. There were 32 players on your team in every game, and over a long night of play you'd run into several hundred players. There would be maybe 0, 1, or 2 mics out of the hundreds of players. When I played Destiny 1, it was nearly impossible to get the attention of someone walking by in the shared MMO-esque areas, because adding them required pulling up the overlay and it was so slow they'd get to the other side of the zone and into the next, before you could finish requesting permission to chat. They clearly intended originally to let you wave and say hello.

Every multiplayer game was a totally solo experience.

Contrast that to playing Halo 2 on the original Xbox. Sure 25% of the games had some kid with the voice modification setting on - this was still the era of extreme paranoia about online interactions - and he'd be saying shit to his little brother next to him in this horrible rasping tone. But you could mute him. And sure 10% of games had some freak screaming at you or huffing into his mic or telling you to die or tearing your eardrums off with a giant hissing bong rip. But you know what 65% of games had? Teammates from across the world ready to jump into a team and try to cooperate. People who you might add to a friends list. It was just so much better. I remember jumping into a game with 3 guys carrying on and I thought I was having a stroke but it turned out they were speaking Dutch.

We've boomeranged back to a middle ground and I don't miss the silence.