I wish you a nice Wednesday afternoon. Today, it’s not directly about gaming, but about software that is closely linked to gaming for many. We are talking about the voice program Skype, which was bought by Microsoft a few years ago. Now everything was supposed to get better and cooler! Haha – wishful thinking.
Basically, I am not one of those people who think that an “acquisition” necessarily has to be something bad, but in the case of Skype, I can only shake my head. For several months now, the software has integrated advertisements. Although I understand that something free has to be somehow financed (this is basically not different for us), the persistence and nature of the ads is really getting on my nerves.
“Weight Loss Industry Shocked! Lose 10kg in 2 weeks if you NEVER eat THESE foods!” and “Do you also want to earn €1000 per day on the Internet?” are among the annoying, but still bearable things. Worse are ads with embedded sound that start even during a conference. This is only topped by advertisements that generate error messages or kick me out of the ongoing game to tell me: “Do you really want to leave this page?” – Hello? What page? I just want to talk! Keep your crap to yourself, Skype!
Hello. You are connected to the Skype Bug Service.
The bugs that come with each patch are just piling on. Skype eagerly overrides (at least for us) administrator rights and doesn’t even allow you to adjust the volume of your own microphone. You can take the check out of “Activate automatic microphone adjustment,” it doesn’t care at all. Especially nice when in the heat of the Overwatch battles the teammates are getting quieter and quieter. Before anyone complains that I have no technical expertise (which is probably true): Yes, these options are also disabled in the control panel and in the sound card driver. Other programs don’t have a problem with that either.
I fondly remember ten years back when the chat program ICQ slowly went out of fashion and everyone switched to Skype because the quality was significantly better than TeamSpeak and chats could still be read long after – excellent for small groups and cliques. If a drinking game were made out of having to down a bottle for every annoying Skype bug, Krombacher could save all the rainforests in the world in 2 days.
Am I getting too worked up? Maybe. Am I just too dumb to use Skype correctly? Also possible, but then all my acquaintances in the friends list would be the same, which doesn’t speak well for the program’s performance. Even if change is something positive and stagnation means death, I wish Skype hadn’t moved so much.
Congrats, Microsoft. All users are just running to TeamSpeak and Discord, well done.
