That's actually exactly what I thought of when reading the article: the sinking silence where everyone knows we're gonna wipe, but nobody wants to be the first

That's actually exactly what I thought of when reading the article: the sinking silence where everyone knows we're gonna wipe, but nobody wants to be the first to say it. Or, conversely, the busy silence where everybody's concentrating on their part and nothing needs to be said because everyone can see what needs doing is being done, especially on well-trodden but still touchy content. Or even the nervous silence as the pulling hunter tries really hard to thread the needle and not get the patrol too. Filling (or not filling) those silences was a big part of good raid leading. Even more than raiding, large-scale pvp with hundreds of people had some bad silences: if it's quiet, nobody's calling, so the callers are all either dead or tanking, so your Lanchester's square law effects go out the window as piles are lost and damage is dispersed for want of direction. But specifically to your point: yeah, Discord is probably the closest to that ideal of lots of purpose-specific channels, but it doesn't have the channel and bulk user management features ts3/etc have. It was really useful to be able to programatically bulk move people by role, or give roles priority speaker/mute other roles at certain times - Huhu's dead so we can go back to not caring about the hunters, etc. MMO leadership and tech work really do have an awful lot in common.