Teams, Lobbies & Chat
5Stack is built around playing with other people, teams, friends, parties, and chat that follows you across the app and into the server.
Teams & friends
Create and manage teams, build out your friends list, and invite friends straight into lobbies and matches. Your Steam friends are synced in automatically, so the people you already play with show up without manual adding, and presence indicators show who's around right now.
A social panel stays docked in the app: your friends list with each friend's Elo and online state, plus live Steam presence, you can see what a friend is doing in other games, not just in 5Stack.
Teams get more than a roster. A team page carries its Elo and awards, its league history, its veto tendencies, and its Scrim Finder settings.
Lobbies & parties
Group up in a lobby to chat, queue, or create matches together. A party has a captain who drives ready-up and team decisions, and stays together through matchmaking (see Quick Play & Matchmaking).
For structured pick-up games, captains drafting, snake pick order, substitute waitlists. See Draft Lobbies.
Chat that follows you
A floating chat widget keeps match comms visible without alt-tabbing, minimize or expand it any time. Match chat shows the live score, a link to the full match, and who's currently in the room.
5Stack chat bridges the web app and in-server, so conversations stay connected whether players are in the browser or in the game.
Every conversation you're in, match, team, lobby, tournament, or organizers, becomes a tab in the chat rail, with an unread badge that counts from the moment you sign in rather than from the moment you open the panel.
Direct messages
Message a friend one-to-one from their player page or straight from your friends list. A direct message opens as its own chat tab, showing the person's avatar instead of a channel icon.
Direct messages are limited to accepted friends in both directions, so nobody can be cold-messaged, and an incoming message opens its tab without yanking you out of the conversation you're reading. They're also kept far longer than room chatter, 30 days rather than the shared chat TTL, because a conversation you can't scroll back through isn't much of a conversation.
Voice chat
Talk to your party in a lobby, or to your team on the match page, with voice chat built into the panel: device pickers, a mic check you can run before anyone hears you, voice-activity or open-mic transmission, and noise suppression.
Connect Discord
Link your Discord account to 5Stack to unlock the bot, create matches, manage lobbies, get match updates, and have your roles synced, without leaving Discord. (Admins configure what the bot does; see Integrations and the Discord Bot guide.)
Smart notifications
Chat and match sounds are context-aware: they automatically quiet down when you're in a game or the tab is hidden, so you're never spammed mid-round. You can pick your own notification sounds and set the volume.
Settings → Notification Preferences decides what reaches you and where. Categories, matches, chat, invites, tournaments, scrims, leagues, teams, events, seasons, account, and news, can be muted individually on the in-app alert bell, and turned on per device as web push notifications that arrive even when 5Stack isn't open. Quiet hours keep push silent during a window you set; those notifications still land in the alert bell.