What I'd like in an online party platform is a shared social area divided into conversations you can join. This is for both social bandwidth and network bandwidth. In real life conversations naturally form and fork off into new ones.
This needs to be more than just separate channels for it to work well. There should be some bleeding of audio between adjacent conversations, and maybe some limited video. I'm thinking perhaps "avatars" of people that get updated once a minute with their current video feed so you can look around the shared social area and get an idea of what is going on and have some sort of shared atmosphere. Maybe a shared background music track?
This needs to be more than just separate channels for it to work well. There should be some bleeding of audio between adjacent conversations, and maybe some limited video. I'm thinking perhaps "avatars" of people that get updated once a minute with their current video feed so you can look around the shared social area and get an idea of what is going on and have some sort of shared atmosphere. Maybe a shared background music track?