5Stack

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Voice Chat ​

Talk to the people you're about to queue with, or the team you're playing with, without leaving the panel. Voice runs on 5Stack's own relay — no Discord server, no third-party service, no per-user cost.

Where you can talk ​

  • Lobby voice: the voice row in a matchmaking lobby or party. Everyone who has accepted the lobby invite is in the channel.
  • Team voice: on the match page and in a draft lobby, scoped to your lineup. A channel is one team's — it can never span both sides, and membership is enforced on the server rather than in the browser.

You're in one channel at a time. Joining a second asks first, then moves you.

Controls ​

Join, mute, and leave sit in the panel itself, with a status dot, a speaking indicator, and a count of how many people are talking out of how many are connected. Muting keeps your connection up and simply stops sending audio, so nobody sees you drop and rejoin.

Voice settings ​

The gear sits on every place you can join a channel — the party hub, the match panel, a draft room — and opens the same settings each time. There's one set of audio settings, not one per surface: pick your devices once and they apply to whatever channel you're in next, remembered across sessions.

They also open before you join, so you can get your setup right while nobody can hear you. Your microphone is only opened while the dialog is up, and released again when you close it unless a call is actually running.

What's in there:

  • Input and output device pickers, remembered across sessions. Unplug a remembered device and 5Stack falls back to the system default instead of leaving you silent. Changing device mid-call swaps it in place — nobody's audio drops.
  • Mic Check: hear your own microphone played back, after the gate, so you hear exactly what everyone else hears — including being cut off when your sensitivity is too high. Use headphones for this one.
  • Input level meter with your threshold drawn on it, and a test tone for the output device.
  • Input mode: Voice Activity with an adjustable sensitivity, or Always Transmit.
  • Noise suppression, applied to the live track, so toggling it doesn't interrupt the call.

Video calls ​

Any voice channel can also carry a camera. It is always opt-in and off by default — joining a channel never turns your camera on, and there is a separate control to do it deliberately.

Your camera is a second, independent stream from your microphone, which is what makes turning it on or off free: the audio carrying the conversation is never renegotiated, so nobody hears a drop-out when someone appears or disappears.

  • You only see other people's cameras once yours is on. Opening the call and sitting there does not show you the room.
  • Tiles show everyone in the channel, with an avatar for anyone who has not turned a camera on, so the grid doesn't reflow as people join.
  • Pop the video out into a floating always-on-top window, and keep it in view while you use the rest of the panel or watch a stream. Popping in and out doesn't interrupt anything — the call keeps running throughout. (The floating window needs a Chromium-based browser; elsewhere the grid stays in the panel.)

Capture is capped well below what a webcam can produce. A call is watched in tiles a few hundred pixels wide, so anything more is frames per second spent on detail nobody looks at — on a machine that is also running a game.

Admin controls ​

Under Settings → Application → Cameras & Microphones:

  • Lobby Voice Chat: turn voice on or off instance-wide. It's on by default.
  • Video Calls: allow cameras in voice channels, on by default wherever voice is. This only decides whether the control is offered — turning a camera on is always the player's own deliberate act. Split into party lobbies and matches and draft rooms, so you can drop the match one if your players run tight on CPU: a tile grid decodes alongside the live stream.

Voice shares the same WebRTC relay as player cameras and live streaming, so there's nothing extra to install or pay for.

Requirements ​

HTTPS is required. Browsers only expose a microphone on a secure origin — on plain HTTP the join button is disabled and says so, rather than failing when clicked. Blocked permission, a missing microphone, and a microphone already in use each report themselves by name instead of as a generic failure.

Cameras additionally need permission for the camera itself, asked for only when you first turn one on.

A TURN relay is optional. Calls connect directly for the large majority of players. Add one only if you see connections that never establish for particular people — usually mobile networks or networks that block UDP.

Discord still works

Voice chat is an alternative to hopping into a Discord call, not a replacement for the Discord bot — per-tournament voice channels, match creation, and role sync are unaffected.