Suggestion: change the default mute mic binding

[Harmonica]

Mousewheel is a clunky default binding for something so important! So many times watching people play this game they have accidentally muted their mic because thumbing the mousewheel is easy to do accidentally and also something people do to see if they can zoom or while trying to scroll a menu or something. If they haven't looked in key bindings previously and seen the binding they will struggle to ever realise why their mic keeps getting muted or how to unmute it!

Please change this binding to something else because people being accidentally muted when first playing the game is actually game ruining (on top of the typical issues with getting mics working in games to begin with!)

[KarmaKrazi]

The mic settings are fine, I've never "thumbed" my mouse wheel and muted myself. If it is an issue, you can change the keybind. That's very typical for a PC game.
You shouldn't have that much of an issue knowing you are muted or not. There is a big microphone icon at the bottom of your screen that goes red and has a line through it while you're muted.
It being bound to the mouse wheel is intentional as it's meant to be a quick hotkey that's easy to access. I know people, including streamers, that use this function constantly as it mutes you in game, but nowhere else, allowing you to talk freely to chat without talking in game.

[Harmonica]

It's really not a common keybind at all. Mousewheel is mostly used for zoom, item changing, maybe (as a button) 'identify target' in FPS games. I don't think I've ever seen mic muting bound to anything other than keyboard keys since it's much harder to press them and you kind of know if you accidentally hit them so you can undo it. If someone manually wants to rebind it to mouse 4 or 5 (ie side buttons) then that's different..

If people don't expect that to be the keybind they won't realise they've hit it accidentally - and most of them actually don't notice the red flashing text, either, I guess it's slightly too subtle.

Also specifically because you haven't experienced this issue and haven't seen anyone experiencing it that doesn't mean it's not an issue! It just means you're lucky you're in a small percentage who haven't seen this plague a game they've been in or been watching streamers play.

[KarmaKrazi]

I never said it was common to have the mouse wheel to mute, I said it was common to be able to change keybinds you don't like, which you can.

If you don't notice red flashing text on the bottom of your screen, I really don't know what to tell you. Do you want it to be more noticeable? Should it encompass the entire screen with actual text saying "your mic is muted right now, use *keybind* to unmute it!"?

I would say the small percentage would be the people having issues with it. You're the first person I've seen complain about it in over 100 hours of playing the game, including with Randoms. I also watch streams of people playing it as well, and like I said previously, they all use the mouse wheel function constantly.

I get that it's not the most common keybind, but contrary to your belief, after a lot of people used it, they did like it, and continued to use it. I'm just saying that I don't feel the need for the default setting to change, as most people don't find it invasive, and those that do can change it.

[Harmonica]

I don't know why they don't notice the red text, it is obvious to me. However I will add that a few were colour blind so maybe they can't even see it very well (it might be grey to them so just looks like HUD text?).

If the dev wants to they can just only change the default for new players and leave it the same for those with > n hours played. Then it only has a positive change.

On the numbers thing..

To put it another way, take an extreme example of issue reporting:
imagine a game accidentally deleting folders outside of its own install folder (nightmare scenario for any dev). Let's say that only a single player has experienced this, and 10,000 others have played the game and never experienced it. If that player posts about the issue, and 10,000 say 'nope, not experienced it' - do you think this is an issue or not? I hope you would agree that even out-numbered 1 to 10,000 that this is still an issue.

So the numbers of people who've never experienced something do not affect the fact of it happening and how it affected people when it did. Dev reads about it and decides if its an issue.

To go further, sadly, this was actually a real bug that one of the games (that is probably consistently in the top ~15 or so games streamed on Twitch) actually experienced a few years back. Players had their data deleted when they tried to run the game because they happened to have installed the game to a custom folder path and the installer couldn't handle the particular path they were using*, so it actually deleted folders outside of its own directory.

When they posted about this issue on the forum the rest of us didn't reply 'well sorry we've never experienced that, not a problem' ...naturally we said 'that's awful we're so sorry you had to experience that' etc and made sure the devs noticed the thread and fixed the issue.

Anyway suffice to say I just reported this mousewheel thing because in my case I've seen this happen every game! To me that seems unlikely to be an outlier. The details of the issue is enough for the dev to decide to fix it or not.

Not experiencing issues is hopefully the default but devs can't rely on that!

* for devs out there wondering how on earth the installer screwed up so badly: it was something to do with users installing the game files directly into the drive root (or Program Files) and not a sub-folder. So when the installer tried to uninstall its own folder... yes, it tried to clear the folder it was installed into *which went poorly*. Case in point of never assuming your players will make sensible decisions! I actually have reoccurring nightmares about coding bugs like this, which I guess is a good thing so I can avoid it..!

[KarmaKrazi]

I get it, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, I just shared mine. In my experience I've seen that a lot of people don't mind, or even enjoy the keybind the devs chose for the mute once they start using it. It may be "unconventional", but it's not game breaking. I don't think comparing it to an actual game breaking bug that deletes data is fair either, as it's just a default keybind. One that you can change to your preference at any time.

I also feel like changing it now, even for just be players, would be detrimental. Imagine being a new player, and unknowingly hitting the new mute hotkey, then having a more experienced player/ multiple of them telling you it's the mouse wheel, when in reality it's been changed. It would just cause even more confusion and frustration.

Sorry about the data deletion bug though. You're right, that is a bit extreme. Hopefully you weren't affected.