Bug: Volume set to 0 when joining party voice

Technical Support
1

How to reproduce:

  1. Start Battlenet
  2. Start Hots on EU server
  3. Join a party
  4. Join party voice

What happens:

Usually one or multiple things of the following:

  • A) All other party members volume is set to 0
  • B) Only one or some other party members volume is set to 0
  • C) My own voice volume is set to 0

How long has this bug been around?

This bug has been around since the introduction of voice chat, but it was hard to reproduce, because up till now, it was a very rare occurence and nobody was able to find a reproducible cause.

How to workaround this bug:

  • All party members must restart hots. Usually it is not required to restart Battlenet.
  • If only one or a few members of the party restart hots, it can be, that the bug still manifests after the restart.

Current new severe intensification of the bug:

SINCE A FEW DAYS, past symptoms have changed in three significant ways:

  1. the bug triggers basically EVERYTIME I join partyvoice. It is NOT a rare event anymore.
  2. Sometimes the volume is set to 0 only after some time has passed (e.g. 30 seconds).
  3. Setting the volume to non-zero is sometimes not possible. It resets itself to 0.

Since I am not the only one with this problem and it is now impossible to use the “workaround”, I urge you to have a look at the code related to voice chat and fix it, or if that is not possible, make that part of the code open source, so that others can have a look at it and propose a fix.

Other threads with users reporting the same problem:

Edit: There has been some progress:

  1. Me and my group of friends are having the suspicion, this might be caused by ALT + Tabbing during the loading screen to Hots or while being in party-voice. In short: switching to the desktop.

  2. Joining partyvoice “automatically” seems to alleviate the problem at least a little bit. While this option was activated, I experienced the volume NOT being 0 while joining party-voice, but it STILL sets itself to 0 ~ 30 seconds later.

2

I have experienced the same issue, it is happening more frequantly now

3

I get this issue too, a few times a week…

4

I have this issue every time I join the party. Before last patch mute occurred simultaneously with joining/inviting, now it takes a few seconds to kick in. Happens both in Windowed (Fullscreen) and Fullscreen modes

5

Same problem here, it’s been going on for weeks now. Do you plan to fix it at some point??

1 Like
6

2023-02-05 Update of my experiences:

  1. the bug also happens, when not using alt+tab when starting hots, but it’s hard to verify, because I cannot control what my partymembers do on their side of the screen.

  2. I checked my windows 10 system default sound settings and found one of them to be at 0. In theory, this should not make a difference, because I use my headset, which is and was never set to zero. Nevertheless, depending on how Heroes of the Storm is coded, it could parse faulty unrelevant system defaults, instead of values from devices in actual use. Talking about following sound settings: Symbol in bottom right corner of desktop → All preferences → System → Sound → Extended Sound options

  3. I noticed something else: When in a party and using party-voice (party of 5), often - but not always - it happens that the users without partyvoice ALSO have a volume slider that looks like it can be modified and it also is set to 0 (although when trying to modify this volume slider, it immediately resets itself back to 0). In any case: This is something new to Hots and was not visible before the last maintenance from a week or two ago.

Update 2023-02-11:

Good news:

This issue seems to have been resolved with the latest maintenance update. At the very least I have not been experiencing any voice issues since then.

Only regression I noticed:

When somebody joined the party and automatically also joined partyvoice, the sound, which notified other partymembers, that somebody joined partyvoice vanished.
So, now we have to “look”, if they also joined voice :wink:
When people join partyvoice manually, there is a notification sound.

Expectation:

  1. New members join the party and auto-join partyvoice.
  2. The “joined party” notification is played out.
  3. Right after, the “joined partyvoice” notification is played out.