I have an audio processing disorder and earmuff mode is a necessity for me to understand anyone in an instance with more than a few people. As-is, even with earmuff mode tuned as finely as I can tune it, I still end up saying "what?" a lot, unless I've cranked it down so far and gotten so close to someone that I can't hear anyone else, and when a big crowd ends up occupying a small, close-in space (as often happens naturally in VRchat), I get terrible sensory overload and have to leave, or at minimum take breaks from the conversation. There are a few issues I have with the earmuff system, and I think changes to them would help rectify these problems.

One major problem I have is that in the course of hanging out in a meet, with the location and arrangement of people conversing changing frequently, I am constantly having to adjust my earmuff settings to ensure I can understand others. If someone comes up to talk to me in a crowded room, I have to crank it all the way down, but then I can't understand anyone who says something to us who's standing a short distance away.

In addition, when a bunch of people crowd into a small space, I have to either lower the volume and distances to the point of not being able to hear anyone who's not next to me, or I end up overloaded and unable to understand anyone. This is a problem for me and quite a few of my friends - as-is, earmuff mode is essentially unable to make this sort of space inhabitable for me.

It would be very helpful to add the option to automatically adjust distances based on some function measuring the number of people in close proximity. This could be implemented in a wide variety of ways, which would need testing to determine how useful they are. Simplest might be to count how many people are within the falloff and close area, and allow users to set a maximum count of people contained in the unmuffled or falloff areas, and shrink (or optionally expand) them to match. Other options might be figuring out a function with the number of users and their distance to the listener as inputs, or something based on how many people are speaking at once, or have spoken within a given time window.

Any of these implementations would help deal with the scenario where a couple of folks are chilling in a tent in a tent or nook in a world, a couple more join them, and you eventually end up with a dozen people inside a 4-person tent, some with earmuffs and some without, talking over each other.