Yo, Angel here.
I’ve been an user of TeamSpeak for the past 10 years, and jumped into trying out TeamSpeak 5 as soon as it was available in its beta form.
Seeing how TeamSpeak is evolving, I am kind of scared. I am unsure if other users will share my opinion, but I started using TS3 because I wanted to have a lightweight client to talk to my friends while playing games. Skype at the time was more resource-intensive, so TS was a perfect match for me - slim, simple, and without unnecessary features (it didn’t hit my fps in my potato PC when I wanted to play some CS:GO, yay!).
The latest updates have been focusing on creating communities and enhancing 1-to-1 communication. Screen sharing, contacts, group chats… While I am not judging the usefulness of these features, we already had the buddy system inside servers for our contacts, and servers also did for group chats - and those features were far less intrusive.
Discord brought communities to the table, and lots of people use it for that purpose. They also brought a better system for game streaming your buddies while you are gaming. But I don’t believe TeamSpeak should go down that path.
I reckon TeamSpeak should keep moving towards the community that it has created throughout the years. Yes, TeamSpeak3’s interface looked like it was created during Windows 98 - it was good and refreshing to have it updated. But I don’t want to have options for screen sharing, or contacts, or group chats. I just want to get in a server that’s on my bookmarks, and talk to my friends when I’m going to jump into a match. I don’t want to wait for 20 seconds while Discord opens - or more time when there are updates available. I don’t need to send pictures to my friends, I’ll probably use Steam chat for that purpose because I’m already playing a game - or even whatsapp if I’m out of my PC.
I’m going back to TeamSpeak3 for the time being. I miss my silly jpeg avatars working and hearing GlaDOS say ‘Disconnected’. The TeamSpeak 5/6 app is amazing, it is just not what I am looking for.
Thank you if you went through the whole thing. I hope that this topic brings a good discussion to the table!