Integrate external chat clients

[Joseph Sneed]

While Steams chat client has vastly improved in quality in recent years the fact is many people still use external services such as discord for game communications. It would be nice if you could work these clients through the steam overlay to avoid having to tab out of a game as there are many games that have difficulty doing that and it would also streamline use.

[Gwarsbane]

No, we don't need the extra bloat. And if you do this for one you will need to do it for all of them. Valve already has an issues with people "accidentally reporting" people via discord and that to fix it they need to talk to a Steam admin on discord (which is a scam btw).

Adding these things into the overlay will just make it seem more legit and scammers will trick even more people.

[Joseph Sneed]

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

No, we don't need the extra bloat. And if you do this for one you will need to do it for all of them. Valve already has an issues with people "accidentally reporting" people via discord and that to fix it they need to talk to a Steam admin on discord (which is a scam btw).

Adding these things into the overlay will just make it seem more legit and scammers will trick even more people.

Honestly this is an argument in favor not against as it creates a more clear relationship and protocol use that helps prevent such things not make them worse.

[Count_Dandyman]

Originally posted by Man Who Stares at Goat:

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

No, we don't need the extra bloat. And if you do this for one you will need to do it for all of them. Valve already has an issues with people "accidentally reporting" people via discord and that to fix it they need to talk to a Steam admin on discord (which is a scam btw).

Adding these things into the overlay will just make it seem more legit and scammers will trick even more people.

Honestly this is an argument in favor not against as it creates a more clear relationship and protocol use that helps prevent such things not make them worse.

No it doesn't because the current system is very clear that anything outside Steam is nothing to do with anything on Steam and that anything agreed to outside Steam is at the users own risk and unsupported.

Adding things into Steam takes that clear separation away and makes it look like Valve are supporting and approving actions on platforms they have no control over.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Man Who Stares at Goat:

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

No, we don't need the extra bloat. And if you do this for one you will need to do it for all of them. Valve already has an issues with people "accidentally reporting" people via discord and that to fix it they need to talk to a Steam admin on discord (which is a scam btw).

Adding these things into the overlay will just make it seem more legit and scammers will trick even more people.

Honestly this is an argument in favor not against as it creates a more clear relationship and protocol use that helps prevent such things not make them worse.

Except that there is a very clear relationship between these 3rd party companies and Valve now and that is that they have no relationship. They are not connected.

By connecting them the way you want them to be connected it will make it look like the companies work together, which they won't be but people who would fall for stuff like "I accidentally reported you, you need to talk to this Valve admin on a totally unrelated and unconnected service and give them your info to fix things up" still start screaming at Valve to fix thigns more than they already are.

So no, Valve should not do this.

[Mad Scientist]

This is one of the worst ideas I've seen on this section.
Valve doesn't have to integrate everything everyone wants, as it would become absolute bloatware for starters. Secondly, Steam is an online game store; its client and thus its own chat is for basic communication and specific purposes. It's not facebook, it's not discord. If it bothers you that much get a 2nd monitor for all the specific things you want to run with the game still displayed.

Originally posted by Man Who Stares at Goat:

Honestly this is an argument in favor not against as it creates a more clear relationship and protocol use that helps prevent such things not make them worse.

What a dishonest reply. They don't need a "relationship" with everyone elses product, bloat tends to also cause higher cpu usage, more memory usage, more network bloat. The client is for a specific purpose, it is not "give me everything I want in one app" which would also mean any one bug within a mega-client could crash/corrupt/cause issues with the whole. If you want more things to do specific things with, you install & use those. "protocol" also has nothing to do with it, and arguably immense bloat makes everything worse.

Want voice comms? Discord.
Want old school group messaging/chats? IRC.
Want recording&streaming software? OBS Studio.
Want to see everything thats not the game while running the game? 2nd monitor.
Want to see specific performance information as an overlay? 3rd party GPU or system app.

Discord is meant primarily as voice communications, there's little to no reason to tab out while you're playing a game. Discords overlay often works with many titles, so there's also no issue there either.

The reason why no one does mega all-in-one give the users everything in one client is because it tends to have drastic performance hits, even with more modern hardware. An MMO for example, is to primarily send & receive location data and text chat information, it doesnt do voice in most as this would interfere with quick information delivery and cause lag for all involved.

Limited world FPS can use voice communication because of the confined areas and typically smaller or more refined engines that deal with a much small player count in an area, so voice and locational/projectile data equally are received with minimal interference of each other.

Voice apps are meant primarily to send/receive voice data, to and from their own app, as separate traffic from games to reduce the chances of interference in games. Integrating it would also make it highly unstable and unreliable for Tuesdays and Steam Sales, seeing as tuesdays on maintenance things tend to crash/stop working/be temporarily down etc and Steam Sales servers have peak traffic. If you have millions of users all trying to constantly reconnect over & over, this will in itself cause a large amount of traffic issues and potentially crashes during those critical times to fix things, and to have the highest performance available.

If you want something specific, you use the tools that exist for it and learn how to be a PC user.

[Joseph Sneed]

Originally posted by Mr. Gentlebot:

This is one of the worst ideas I've seen on this section.
Valve doesn't have to integrate everything everyone wants, as it would become absolute bloatware for starters. Secondly, Steam is an online game store; its client and thus its own chat is for basic communication and specific purposes. It's not facebook, it's not discord. If it bothers you that much get a 2nd monitor for all the specific things you want to run with the game still displayed.

Originally posted by Man Who Stares at Goat:

Honestly this is an argument in favor not against as it creates a more clear relationship and protocol use that helps prevent such things not make them worse.

What a dishonest reply. They don't need a "relationship" with everyone elses product, bloat tends to also cause higher cpu usage, more memory usage, more network bloat. The client is for a specific purpose, it is not "give me everything I want in one app" which would also mean any one bug within a mega-client could crash/corrupt/cause issues with the whole. If you want more things to do specific things with, you install & use those. "protocol" also has nothing to do with it, and arguably immense bloat makes everything worse.

Want voice comms? Discord.
Want old school group messaging/chats? IRC.
Want recording&streaming software? OBS Studio.
Want to see everything thats not the game while running the game? 2nd monitor.
Want to see specific performance information as an overlay? 3rd party GPU or system app.

Discord is meant primarily as voice communications, there's little to no reason to tab out while you're playing a game. Discords overlay often works with many titles, so there's also no issue there either.

The reason why no one does mega all-in-one give the users everything in one client is because it tends to have drastic performance hits, even with more modern hardware. An MMO for example, is to primarily send & receive location data and text chat information, it doesnt do voice in most as this would interfere with quick information delivery and cause lag for all involved.

Limited world FPS can use voice communication because of the confined areas and typically smaller or more refined engines that deal with a much small player count in an area, so voice and locational/projectile data equally are received with minimal interference of each other.

Voice apps are meant primarily to send/receive voice data, to and from their own app, as separate traffic from games to reduce the chances of interference in games. Integrating it would also make it highly unstable and unreliable for Tuesdays and Steam Sales, seeing as tuesdays on maintenance things tend to crash/stop working/be temporarily down etc and Steam Sales servers have peak traffic. If you have millions of users all trying to constantly reconnect over & over, this will in itself cause a large amount of traffic issues and potentially crashes during those critical times to fix things, and to have the highest performance available.

If you want something specific, you use the tools that exist for it and learn how to be a PC user.

the solution to this problem is very simple if you take 5 seconds to think about it. Simply break the external plug ins into parts and download the ones you use just like any other web browser as that is basically what the overlay is. Not hard to figure out. Basically all I was suggesting is something that allows you to use discords controls through the interface not the entire damn voice chat as some people don't want to spend hundreds on a second monitor...

[Mad Scientist]

Originally posted by Man Who Stares at Goat:

the solution to this problem is very simple if you take 5 seconds to think about it. Simply break the external plug ins into parts and download the ones you use just like any other web browser as that is basically what the overlay is. Not hard to figure out. Basically all I was suggesting is something that allows you to use discords controls through the interface not the entire damn voice chat as some people don't want to spend hundreds on a second monitor...

Then don't use the word INTEGRATE.
It's a voice chat, you don't really need to interact with it once you're in a game, that's the entire purpose of the app is so you don't have to do anything else. If you need to moderate, alt tab like everyone else.

[Joseph Sneed]

Originally posted by Mr. Gentlebot:

Originally posted by Man Who Stares at Goat:

the solution to this problem is very simple if you take 5 seconds to think about it. Simply break the external plug ins into parts and download the ones you use just like any other web browser as that is basically what the overlay is. Not hard to figure out. Basically all I was suggesting is something that allows you to use discords controls through the interface not the entire damn voice chat as some people don't want to spend hundreds on a second monitor...

Then don't use the word INTEGRATE.
It's a voice chat, you don't really need to interact with it once you're in a game, that's the entire purpose of the app is so you don't have to do anything else. If you need to moderate, alt tab like everyone else.

I apologize for the miscommunication I am not a programmer myself and am not going to know the exact terms. That said I have had issues many times trying to alt tab out. It does not always work and it also would help when getting text messages through discord as most people use that over steams chat and its a pain to alt tab out for that constantly.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by Man Who Stares at Goat:

I apologize for the miscommunication I am not a programmer myself and am not going to know the exact terms. That said I have had issues many times trying to alt tab out. It does not always work and it also would help when getting text messages through discord as most people use that over steams chat and its a pain to alt tab out for that constantly.

The inability to alt tab out would be due to the game and/or settings.

Check the game's setting and see if you can set it to borderless Windowed. This allows for easier alt-tabing into Discord.

Hope you are not playing multiplayer games when checking those messages. I've lost too many games due to people checking messages instead of focusing on the game.

Integrated would require Valve to either buy or pay Discord for use in such a way. Discord isn't open source after all. The rest is either on Discord, Windows or the game's developer.