Nah that was a wicked sweet burn.
Where did my enthralling story about the bird go

How is it awful? Steam has voice chat (which is good quality now), you can use it in-game, no need to install another program, you can organise games much easier in the chat etc.

Edited once, 22/4/11 - 2:02pm.

Currently you are the only person idling in the steam chat channel for the group.

They're awful because they are segregated, exclusive and don't have enable you to mix with other communities(You know, the ones you'd be hoping people would come across from, even temporarily, to help revive L4D!).

Granted you are right about the voice quality(I was quite impressed) however if you're in a pug you'll probably just use in game chat to communicate with your team and if you're trying to look for a scrim you're not going to have 50 people all on voice chat on steam at once for obvious reasons. Sure you can organize games easy with the few teams that do currently scrim(and are part of the regular few) but what about players that form teams and are part of other gaming circles - Those not in the L4D circle-jerk? Exclusivity isn't a good thing for expanding a community.

While the new CG L4D group is a good thing, don't get me wrong, part of what makes IRC so great is that you can cross promote. Getting people from other communities to check out a stream might make them interested in forming a team/joining a team. Part of what made me interested in Counter-Strike competitively was watching a match between two top teams on HLTV that was advertised on iRC in an ISP's gaming channel(I forget which one it was now as that was quite a long time ago). It made me look at the game in a new light and got me excited to join a clan. And so I did!

The steam CHAT functions/channels aren't great, the voice chat function is great for a couple of people/friends but most of these people will have access to a mumble/ventrillo server or as previously mentioned - Just use in game voice comms.

The major problem I see is the size of the active scrimming community - it's too small to warrant such a large group and from past experience - too difficult to inject new blood into. Many communities experience these sorts of things and I personally feel that gaming communities are/were stronger when they use an IRC channel on a major gaming IRC network(Gamesurge, Quakenet etc). It's a great way to get people who could be potentially interested(Idlers and the like)and to have them take a look. You can advertise scheduled casts in the channel etc and it won't disturb people with annoying popups.

xoxo

Edited once, 22/4/11 - 3:14pm.

It's not a big deal... get on Steam, open the chat, continue doing whatever you were doing. If everyone did this, we would have a large chatroom in no time.

I agree, IRC is a great promotional tool. Without it I probably would have never started online gaming. But a quiet little L4D channel isn't going to attract anyone, if anything a Steam group will be more noticeable since it will appear on people's profiles.

IRC has another huge flaw too, nobody wants to alt-tab out constantly to see if there's a scrim waiting. So someone asking for a scrim is more likely to go unnoticed and/or lose interest, than if they had a room full of people to message.

<3

Edited once, 23/4/11 - 7:50am.

Master race multi-monitor reporting in.

You can use the steam browser to login to iRC using an online client like mibbet.