Progression w/ Ventrilo/TeamSpeak

[PatrickStar]

Voice chat is a fantastic tool...if you have the people with the discipline to use it. I think the positives and negatives have been reported ad nauseum here. If you have immature fucktards that can't control themselves (or take direction) then VC becomes unbearable. I've only used VC since starting WoW.

First guild that used it was atrocious. Utter lack of discipline that makes me wonder how people get to work in the morning. I almost swore off VC forever. The second guild (current) is much more disicplined and professional come showtime. I don't give a fuck what people do non-raid times. That is the time to goof off. But when it's killing time we STFU and focus. Very little non-essential stuff is said.

[yknits]

Originally Posted by Aindraa

I rarely post but thought I would add this:

My rb6 clan used RW as well in 98/99 for our 3v3 and 4v4 matches. It was considered a semi-cheat because when you died you couldn't type in game to report on enemy movements but could (obviously) still talk on RW. Most people couldn't use it unless it was hosted on a T1 line, which few had. I think this is the greatest reason why voice communication is being used now in online games. It doesn't lag your system and most have at least a DSL connection.

3 friends and I started over on a one of the new PVP servers and we just use my old guilds Vent server. It's great for instances and unbelievable in PVP. No, it's not new but it sure is much better than it used to be.



Just curious, but what was the name of your clan? Mine was rATF, and I used to go by Carnical/Karnical. If you used www.clanladder.com then I'm going to assume you were either in rATF or SR6.

I was in ATF in both rb6 and rogue spear. We made it to rank 1 in rb6 and rank 3 in rogue spear. We would have made rank 1 if EG hadnt fucked us over due to an LDD complain that SR had played us over them. Blah blah blah ladder drama.

I was ATF_St1nky

[Szlia]

Voice chat is a tool. You can always count on the idiots to make poor use of a tool and on sensible people to use it well.

That said, voice chat is something violent at a conceptual level. When you play EQ, you know of course that all the other players are people in front of a computer, but it's a somewhat abstract notion that you put in the back of your head. The text interface lowers the social barriers of communication, so engaging in chat with unkown people is made easy.

With voice chat, suddenly the reality of the existence of the other players is unavoidable and suddenly the social interactions follow rules that are much closer to the ones of the everyday life. This is pretty violent for the people that are not very sociable and those who like MMORPG for the escapism. On the up side, I suspect it drives people to be a little more civil.

[Remfin]

Originally Posted by Faille

I prefer text for a lot of things. you type it once, it stays there for everyone to read. You say something in voice and half the people don't hear because the other have were talking over the top so you have to explain it to them again and again.

Really need integrated voice to text more then anything.

Give this man a fucking medal! Voice-chat is ass for a variety of reasons, and I have yet to see any situation where it was actually needed - even WoW PVP is not that fast paced that it's required like it can be for some FPS situations. All it does is cause problems, and it's a nice big F-U to the deaf or hearing-impaired

If anything it makes players worse. On C'thun they tune into someone calling the beams instead of, you know, noticing the GIANT GLOWING RED EYE IN-GAME. Seriously, why in the world would voicechat somehow be better than an in-game warning? That's before you even deal with the fact that the variety of accents/equipment mean you have to decipher half the shit anyway

All the Antivoice arguments apply 100% to ingame chat as well.

Ingame chat does not have accents, any real lag, and oh ya deaf people can take instructions too

[Quineloe]

Ingame chat does not have accents, any real lag, and oh ya deaf people can take instructions too

Sorry, there is an accent in chat. Leet sp33ch, and too many use it. "u r" is something that doesn't exist on voice.

"Real lag" is a stupid argument. The lag on the game servers are not real? There is no lag!

dyslexic people can't give instructions on ingame chat btw. handicapped people are handicapped when doing stuff, big surprise there.

[Bizanich]

Originally Posted by Ham n Cheese

Only time I used voice chat reguarly was for city of heroes, their ui sucked and combat is insanely chaotic at times. That guild was a little more mature than you would expect most of the time though, I think Vorph even used it then .

heh..Vorph's voice was sexy.

/ducks

[yknits]

Originally Posted by Remfin

Give this man a fucking medal! Voice-chat is ass for a variety of reasons, and I have yet to see any situation where it was actually needed - even WoW PVP is not that fast paced that it's required like it can be for some FPS situations. All it does is cause problems, and it's a nice big F-U to the deaf or hearing-impaired

If anything it makes players worse. On C'thun they tune into someone calling the beams instead of, you know, noticing the GIANT GLOWING RED EYE IN-GAME. Seriously, why in the world would voicechat somehow be better than an in-game warning? That's before you even deal with the fact that the variety of accents/equipment mean you have to decipher half the shit anyway

Ingame chat does not have accents, any real lag, and oh ya deaf people can take instructions too

First of all there are programs that will translate noise into text real time. It works similar to dragon naturally speaking.

Second... the people bitching about phonetics are just retards. Most of the time, that I have encountered, they don't take into account regional, cultural or multi-lingual aspects. Instead they prefer to just rag on people. Mute them. Easy fix.

That doesnt diminish the value of VOIP. If you have any RL friends or family who play it is even better.

Ever experience those long chats during camps in EQ? They still exist in wow if you look. Except now it is used by voip. It is a powerful tool that can be utilized for greatness or tardom. It's always your choice but knocking it is just plain ignorance.

It's like saying good shoes dont help you run better than sandels. Goggles dont help you swim underwater because you can just open your eyes. Translators arent needed because we could just learn the language. Sun Block is crap because you could just stand in the shade.

It does help. Tools are only good or bad from the people who use them.

People are just as annoying in chat. Why do you think so many people bitch about the LFG channel or General chat.

[Linus]

Btw, for those saying that MMOs should integrate voice chat - they never will, and here's why: liability. Unless they're recording every single conversation as audio files and then archiving them; they won't have any record on which to resolve complaints...

You think people enjoy doing their best Andrew Dice Clay / David Duke imitations in text? Wait until the lvl 1 alts log in to the general voice chat and scream whatever ethnic slurs they can think of. That'd be swell.

So, while Vent/TS are great 3rd party tools, I have a strong feeling that's all they will be for a long while.

[yknits]

Originally Posted by Linus

Btw, for those saying that MMOs should integrate voice chat - they never will, and here's why: liability. Unless they're recording every single conversation as audio files and then archiving them; they won't have any record on which to resolve complaints...

You think people enjoy doing their best Andrew Dice Clay / David Duke imitations in text? Wait until the lvl 1 alts log in to the general voice chat and scream whatever ethnic slurs they can think of. That'd be swell.

So, while Vent/TS are great 3rd party tools, I have a strong feeling that's all they will be for a long while.

OR you could think outside the box.

How about a hybrid version of what you speak of. Similar to BF2 where you can communicate with your group via voip and the rest of server by chat.

Furthermore a custom command raid/group voip. A system where the raid/group leader has master voip privileges. When he/she talks the rest are automatically muted. Then ad a vote initiation so that if somebody goes LD and group voip leader changes to an asshat control can be regained. Then take it a step further to allow /mute player. It would work like /ignore player. This system could be tiered. Leader ---> promoted ----> raider. Now people can chat as they wish because leader ---> promoted would silence them when raid orders were to be given.

Could even setup multple groups with multple voip broadcast functions. Would allow for people to be in multple channels at once. (I frequently am on 2 voip servers and hotkey them different.) Then have a global broadcast which would broadcast to everyone.

Group breakdown could be for example by class/role. Healers could bitch about /pause cast CH and then officers could cyber while the dps beats off to somebody broadcasting Madonna. While all this is going on the raid leader could decide to say something and everyone would hear him/her clearly.

Give a slider to max/min bandwidth usage and allow for multiple codec support on client side.

Keep the good ol' chat functions for those socially inept.

Incorporate voip->text translation for handicap accessibility.


Basically this turns voip into chat

zomg voip is the new chat

[Sancus]

Wait until the lvl 1 alts log in to the general voice chat and scream whatever ethnic slurs they can think of. That'd be swell.

The very concept of a general voice chat is completely stupid. Voice chat only works remotely well in disciplined, small environments. When you have an environment where there's hundreds of people and they're all capable of talking over eachother, it would render it completely useless. Not to mention, voice is intrusive by nature. The annoyance and inconvenience of general voice chat far outweighs any advantage it might offer.

The only way I could see it *might* work if you could afford to put the CPU time into rendering peoples volume levels/whether you can hear them based on their distance from you. Then it might be doable. Would still be more intrusive and annoying than text chat, though.

One of the reasons I dislike voice chat in general, though, is that you can't scroll back. As someone who is almost always multi-tasking, that's particularly annoying.

but many people who typed like retards turned out to be just fine over voice chat.

I happen to like that retard detection. Someone who types like a retard but "turns out to be just fine in voice chat", is *still* a retard. It's just hidden.

[Zinke]

Originally Posted by Linus

Btw, for those saying that MMOs should integrate voice chat - they never will, and here's why: liability. Unless they're recording every single conversation as audio files and then archiving them; they won't have any record on which to resolve complaints...

You think people enjoy doing their best Andrew Dice Clay / David Duke imitations in text? Wait until the lvl 1 alts log in to the general voice chat and scream whatever ethnic slurs they can think of. That'd be swell.

So, while Vent/TS are great 3rd party tools, I have a strong feeling that's all they will be for a long while.

I don't think anyone is saying replace text chat in game with voip. They are saying that the Vent/TS clients should be built into game itself, and used the same way it's currently used, just streamlined and more user efficient.

You join a group, the group leader or whoever clicks something in game to create a voip channel for the group. Everyone in the group can click to then join it, or not.

There's some people in my guild who tried to use Vent for the first time, couldn't get it working correctly, and said 'fuck it'.

Shit, it took me a ton of trial and error to get it working right, as I've got an Audigy card with the front mounted panel, and while I'm not IT specialist I've been around computers long enough to figure things out pretty quickly. The myriad of input options for my soundcard, combined with the options in Vent itself gave me dozens of ways that it should have worked and everyone might hear me. But, not all of them worked for some reason. The soundcard would pick it up, ventrilo would give me a green light saying it was hearing me, but no one else did. I had to keep changing input one by one, saying 'test?' until someone responded that they could hear me.

I think some of the input names got crossed when sending it to the Vent program itself. I'd have Vent set to receive something mic, and the soundcard set to pickup mic, the mic plugged into the connector labeled 'mic' but it wouldn't work. One would be set on Aux and another on mic and it'd work then though. I was too lazy to go further into once it actually worked, and just saved the settings somewhere else in case it ever screws up again.

[Iannis]

Originally Posted by Vorph

My perspective is something along the lines of, "Yes I know it helps, but frankly I don't give a shit." If voice chat continues to become more and more of a given in every MMO to the point where you cannot succeed in the game without it, I will quite happily stop playing them. I'm too old to listen to a bunch of kids babble about inane shit I couldn't care less about when I could be listening to my music instead.

There's not a lot to add to this. The man managed to say it all.

As to the pvp/TS argument. If you suck, or if you're running in pugs, TS helps a lot. If you're running with a solid crew that's used to each other's habits, then it's not a do or die sort of thing. Sometimes TSing with a crew like that fucks you up, cause you're too busy laughing and calling each other nancy boys to notice the other team just shot a rokkit up your poopr.

[DiscW]

and I have yet to see any situation where it was actually needed - even WoW PVP is not that fast paced that it's required like it can be for some FPS situations. All it does is cause problems, and it's a nice big F-U to the deaf or hearing-impaired

You either barely pvp in WoW, or must really suck.

[Remfin]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

Sorry, there is an accent in chat. Leet sp33ch, and too many use it. "u r" is something that doesn't exist on voice.

"Real lag" is a stupid argument. The lag on the game servers are not real? There is no lag!

dyslexic people can't give instructions on ingame chat btw. handicapped people are handicapped when doing stuff, big surprise there.

l33t speech means you immediately identify the retards...not to mention there are many mods that actually "fix" l33t speech if you cared to. You can't do that with voice short of muting them completely. And duh handicapped people are handicapped...but this excludes them for no discernable benefit. The great equalizer of MMOs was that anyone can play them, that's why they're escapism...(which also ties into the gold-buying shit, the point of these games are level playing fields untainted by your personal situations in the real world)

[Hebbin]

I really hate how voice com has made synching one of the most dominant strategies in pvp. It sucks when every battle looks like this:

call target
3, 2, 1
instant death
repeat