Another way to achieve the same, would be to give them volume sliders under game sounds. One could turn the range volume lower, or completely off. I would prefer a lower volume, this way it could be balanced against the annoyance and neccessity of range communications.
It would kinda suck if a guy was not able to warn a friendly that he was hiding troops, and to please change course to avoid unwanted attention (one example) because others were chewing the fat, or carrying conversation unsuited for speaker play on a family computer.
That wouldn't solve the problem of not being able to hear one person over another.
If you ever notice, nobody's voice is ever played over somebody else's. You can't interrupt someone on VOX. All transmissions are recorded in their entirety and then sent to the other players on channel. On the receiving end all the transmissions "wait in line" in the order they were received and play one after the other. In a busy environment a bunch of rowdy chatters can literally clog up the comms. A buddy can give you a check call and you might not hear it until 10 seconds after you've already been shot down. It can get so bad that you might hear a transmission that's several minutes old, or they can back up so far as to crash the program. I've never experienced the last two scenarios myself, thank God.
If we could have a hot-key to de-tune range when things things get too hectic the squads that depend on good communications would be much happier. We can't have every player in the came learn brevity and syntax and exercise better voice-comm discipline, but we can't turn them off either. Unless you want to ".mute twerp1 .mute twerp2 .mute twerp3 etc." in the middle of dogfight. Have a purple M or something in the top left of the screen when Range is muted like the red R that's up there when you're recording.
Most squads, or at least every squad that I've met, have given up on VOX and have their own private Vent and TS servers (including my squad), and I think that's telling. Now let's give the players that don't have the resources (or know how) to run their own servers the same capabilities (or close to it) as those who do. Maybe in these times some players will decide to save some money and let their servers go if VOX's most agonizing moments can be stopped with a simple button press.
