I've been playing with the beta for a while now (though I haven't used the voice part yet), and it seems pretty modern in both good ways and bad. I mostly am just really happy that I can easily...
I've been playing with the beta for a while now (though I haven't used the voice part yet), and it seems pretty modern in both good ways and bad.
I mostly am just really happy that I can easily paste images into the chat, and that it has updated the various "status" settings to include an "invisible" option instead of just "offline".
Visually it looks pretty nice, and if it's a reflection of the upcoming overhaul for the rest of the client, I'm pretty excited. It does seem to suffer a bit from modern design trends around whitespace, and I can't seem to fit as many contacts in the list as I used to be able to. The tabs for different conversations do feel kind of off to me though, and I'm not yet entirely sure why.
I do really like being able to see the extra detail in the "this friend is in-game" section though, being able to quickly see that so-and-so is playing Dota is less actionable than knowing that he's a level 2 Bristleback (game has just started and is going to take a while) or a level 25 Spectre (game should be over soon). Grouping party members is also a nice bonus.
I hadn't even heard that it was a thing until it popped up when I opened Steam yesterday. I have no use for it, personally; for the friends that I play games with, we use Discord to keep in touch,...
I hadn't even heard that it was a thing until it popped up when I opened Steam yesterday. I have no use for it, personally; for the friends that I play games with, we use Discord to keep in touch, as it's game platform independent. Of the people I play with, I have some added to my Steam friends, some on BNet, but both platforms have a subset of the total friends I play with. I can't see myself switching chat platforms to just talk with people I have on Steam.
I've been playing with the beta for a while now (though I haven't used the voice part yet), and it seems pretty modern in both good ways and bad.
I mostly am just really happy that I can easily paste images into the chat, and that it has updated the various "status" settings to include an "invisible" option instead of just "offline".
Visually it looks pretty nice, and if it's a reflection of the upcoming overhaul for the rest of the client, I'm pretty excited. It does seem to suffer a bit from modern design trends around whitespace, and I can't seem to fit as many contacts in the list as I used to be able to. The tabs for different conversations do feel kind of off to me though, and I'm not yet entirely sure why.
I do really like being able to see the extra detail in the "this friend is in-game" section though, being able to quickly see that so-and-so is playing Dota is less actionable than knowing that he's a level 2 Bristleback (game has just started and is going to take a while) or a level 25 Spectre (game should be over soon). Grouping party members is also a nice bonus.
I hadn't even heard that it was a thing until it popped up when I opened Steam yesterday. I have no use for it, personally; for the friends that I play games with, we use Discord to keep in touch, as it's game platform independent. Of the people I play with, I have some added to my Steam friends, some on BNet, but both platforms have a subset of the total friends I play with. I can't see myself switching chat platforms to just talk with people I have on Steam.