f13.net

I am an avid WoW-Player. I usually play three days per week and 5-6 hours per session so I do not consider myself to be a casual gamer. I am no catass, but I have enough free time so that I could go on MC and BWL raids and I even had offers from several guilds to do so.

Alas I can't attend those raids. I play WoW on an Apple Powerbook and am therefore unable to use voice-chat programs. Both Ventrilo and Teamspeak only offer Windows and Linux clients. The Teamspeak guys have plans to support the Macintosh platform when they release Teamspeak 3 but it is in development since early 2004 and the release date has been delayed to the end of 2006.

This wouldn't be a problem if Teamspeak was not a mandatory requirement for joining raids on my server. Raid parties plowing through MC, Zul'Gurub and Blackwing Lair laugh at me when I tell them that I want to join but do not have the ability to use Teamspeak. I have been kicked out of countless Scholo, Strat and BRS raids because I have no Teamspeak and even battlegrounds are now closed to me because even pick-up groups now use voice-chat after they repeatedly got their asses handed to them by groups using teamspeak.

People tell me that the main reasons they use voice-chat is so that they can coordinate more easily and that it is the only way to react quickly enough to certain events in instances or during boss battles. Many of these people say that instances like Blackwing Lair or Molten Core are very hard or even impossible to master without voice communications. These are valid reasons and I can hardly argue against them. It is rather more efficient and fasterr to say something than to type it. People do not have to track the raid-chat, can concentrate on the battle at hand and there are numerous situations where every second counts.

However this doesn't change the fact that a certain percentage of gamers, who might be capable and have enough time, are excluded from endgame content because they might not be able to use voice-chat. People on dial-up or isdn for example or those playing their game on an exotic  platform.

I do not play other online-games very much but I assume that similar problems exist in other online-games, where there is challenging high-end raid content or quick coordination is the key to success.

So I wondered. Why do game developers design content that is difficult or even impossible to master without the help of voice chat and at the same time do not even offer support for voice communications in their game? Why do they design encounters the way they do even though a large number of people are still using dial-up to play and are therefore not even able to play these encounters?

Well one could argue that with broadband this might no longer be a problem, but why rely on third party tools to offer support for something the game company should have done in the first place?

To top it off, do you people have any ideas on how to make communication and coordination more efficient without the reliance on voice chat?

Because lowband, no-quick-communication-required fights are boring.  EQ1 had "clerics hit their CH macro every x seconds, melee hit autoattack and go afk for 10 minutes" style boss fights.  So, WoW went with the "lots of adds, some unpredictability, quick decisionmaking required" goal (not always achieved, of course) for their fights.  The players respond with voice chat, which makes that stuff much easier.  Just like the players responded with addons that essentially play the raid for you.  I don't know that the developers believed that teamspeak would be used on such a wide scale.

My ultimate goal for the genre is voice-to-text.  It's (a) not as immersion-destroying as voice chat, (b) is workable with large groups of people, and (c) does not require me to wear a headset that effectively cuts me off from the real world while I'm playing (the thing I hate most about vent/ts).  The problem is that the technology does not exist yet in non-sucky form.  Haem doesn't like it because you still have to look in a chat window.

I like voice chat. Been a big fan of it ever since I played BF1942 in a clan. I feel it really elevates the gameplay, at the expense of immersion. But immersion usually sucks in mmo anyway, so it's probably worth it. I really dislike the chat box, but then I'm an old skool UO player...I liked that style. Games are getting a lot better about showing info in the gamespace instead of the UI, though.

That does suck about OSX/Unix support (either would be fine imo) for the voice apps. Of course, you could slap together a bits box and run winders on it just for voice comms...But until you can figure out telepathy, voice comms will rule the day.

Very true in GW, if you want to compete at all beyond a certain level you must have voice chat.
I don't know if voice-to-chat is so good, too easy for text to get lost on the screen.

Just to go off on a tangent for a sec, why are people who don't always have enough time to put 2-4 hours per night to a game excluded from endgame content like dragon raids? Because it's easier to make the encounters take asstons of time than make them challenging or thought-provoking.  :evil:

No, I don't like voice-to-text because the genre, especially in WoW and CoH, have moved outside the chat box. There is no real need to look in the chat box moment to moment like there was in EQ and DAoC. Most of the important stuff happens on the screen between the combatants, including buffs, debuffs and situational things like dodges or parries. That is a GOOD thing. Of course, a bigger problem with WoW that makes the game require voice chat for such an occurrence as those high-end raids you speak of is that the action happens too goddamn fast. I've noticed that in the instances I've been in. The speed seems just about right for solo combat, but you start adding groups into it, and there's really very little time to react in any way other than a kneejerk way. Combat in WoW groups really just feels like uncontrolled chaos, and I end up having to focus on just my own actions or I get lost. This may be because I'm mostly playing solo, but still. I think WoW (and CoH) would both benefit from combat that wasn't quite so frenetic. Or built in voice-chat, but I imagine the fact that they still get loot lag and server queues would mean Blizzard isn't close to being able to make voice chat that works, even with all their money hats.

I loved the text to voice feature of ut2k4. You never really had to look at the text box, ever. It would get backed up if you were on a pub server and everyone was spamming, but you could set it to be team-only and that rocked in RO.

Also, Mr. Kelly, if you want to do more than edit videos, load photoshop, and play WoW and Shadowbane, I'd buy a PC.

Haemish,

Never though tof that.. Damn, good points.  I know that COH felt like a better game because of the chat bubbles.  I would love to see a game instigate Voice Chat automatically (with in the game environment) when a group entered an Instance (this could be enabled or disabled in the UI).  Not outside of it, but in the instance.

I'd also argue that many people don't want a challenge.  Look at all the spoiler sites, hint books, and cheats available for games these days.  People want the immediate gratification only available from the shiniest new DING generator.  Challenge in a game would be stuck in a niche and even that would be eventually ruined by spoilers.  Though there are different types of challenges.  I like steep learning curves and lots of decision making.  Others like reflex-based challenges.

As for voice chat, I'd say that PvP games really prosper with it.  I'm not sure that I feel good about this addition, but a voice program does help a lot. With all the freeware available game designers really have no need to make this available as part of the game itself.  Most gamers are savvy enough to find a program of choice (ventrillo is mine) and get a server setup for gaming. Yes, it does break immersion... it also breaks the monotony inherent in so many games in this genre.  For me, it's about the social interactions anyway.  MMOG's are like a chat room with distractions.

I'd rather having MMOGs by more like a movie experience than a sitcom experience, but thats a  personal preference.

Fuck them if they don't like a challenge. Why are they playing a game anyway if they don't want a challenge to overcome?

See, that's where the whole world vs. game thing gets muddy. A game provides a challenge, a world not necessarily so. MMOG's being thought of as chat rooms with distractions are for people who don't want a challenge. But we're talking about WoW and games like it, so anyone who doesn't want a challenge should just go masturbate furiously in the corner while someone rings a bell every 10 seconds.

I think you missed the point.

MMOG's are thought of as chat rooms with distractions exactly because they don't pose a challenge.  THAT'S THE PROBLEM.  The mass market doesn't want a challenge.  They want to sit in front of their computer and be part of a movie. They want to throw down their $15 and be entertained in a mindless sort of way.  Run a cartoon around, hear a DING, log off.  I made the comment about mmog's being like a chat room with distractions because that's pretty much all they are at this point.  There's almost no depth and gameplay so mindless that any drooling mouthbreather can get to the end successfully. I think that what we've seen in MMOG's is the transition from games to a form of entertainment.  I'd personally rather be engrossed in the game than to use a voice program to discuss politics while whacking foozle #2589 or waiting on some raid to commence.

This is where voice chat could actually play a constructive role in the genre.  Make the game so challenging and involving that I don't have time to articulate my thoughts by typing.  We get this in FPS all the time. Of course in FPS it's because we need our hands doing other things (targeting, running, shooting).   Raids can be this way to a point, but I think most of us agree that this isn't the kind of endgame we're looking for. 

You're pretty lucky that Apples play WoW.. Sorry about your situation. :/

In regards to the challenge spiel, many high-end instances, BWL especially, require a fair amount of skill to overcome.  One could argue that these raids are just about "finding the right strategy", but we have failed with established strategies because of personal mistakes in the heat of battle.  In reality, it takes a quite a lot of practice and time to become familiar with your skills, and build the optimal UI so that it gives you the information you need and the ability to react to that information as quickly as possible.  Some players are better at this than others.

Does this not sufficiently meet the definition of 'skill'?

I say this in complete innocence and naivete but can't you run Windows Teamspeak through an emulator?  Pretty sure two of my friends do exactly that with their powerbooks.

One aside: getting things outside the chat box is important to also cripple cheat macros.  Not sure, but I presume there is still local chat logging which allows for system messages to be interpreted.  It probably is more inclusive to use voice. 

I'm looking forward to the time when there is little text to read at all.  Integrated voice chat.  NPCs that speak to you.  I don't want to look at a text box ever.  I want to see an uncluttered screen in front of me, instead of having six different channels to keep track of.

Although I'm not sure how that could be implemented in Ironforge where the noise would be deafening.  I suppose the same way people can filter the text channels.

Because it's fun? To blow of some steam after work? Some mindless diversion? To get a break from the challenges of daily life?

I agree with the overall point, I don't care much for spoiler sites and 'strategy guides' that basically usurp the role of 'game manual', but I do see how people wouldn't always want a challenge. Have some challenging games for when folks are in that mood, some easy fun games for when they aren't.

Oh, and the whole timesinky uber end to WoW can bite my nuts. But I thank Blizz for freeing up my dance card.
That worked well in UO.

Up until now, I dont believe that any MMOGs offered Mac clients. So we are hitting a new problem with WoW. Before every one in the MMOG had access to the voice programs, so it was no problem. With no Mac client for TS or Ventrillo we suddenly has a small percentage excluded for what is fast becoming a major part of any MMOG.

We have several people in my guild that play on Macs, and its much harder for them in raids. Some of them have actually build or otherwise gotten hold of crappy PCs just to run vent on. Others make sure they really really read up on what is required, so they know how to react to the different situations with out hearing it.

On my server it makes it harder to do raid content with no voice chat, but we try to go out of our way to accomidate people who cant use it, and hope that the vent people finish their mac client really soon.

How about...

Choosing a character voice to translate your own into?

If TS were built into the game, I wonder if it would be possible to choose a voice/persona that we would speak into into.  No offense to some of you guys - but when I hear our big Tauren tank on a raid speak with all the testosterone of Woody Allen it loses it for me lol.  In other words rather than use our real voices - we could choose a voice type from the game.

I want to see voice ---> Character voice

Not that I'm any sort of paragon of knowledge nor experience, but I just wrote (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=123) about voicechat vs text.

Anyway, to the plight of Jeff, I feel for ya. Have you tried running Teamspeak in a Virtual PC shell? I don't know your system Specs, nor which version you're up to in OS X, but Teamspeak seems to have a relatively light resource load.

You could join a more casual guild too, one that raids but not at the pace of elite PUGs.
I'm looking forward to a time when numbers are so irrelevant there's no need to read at all. I personally feel the continued reliance on chat boxes is based on a combination of old skool "I don't want to lose my anonymity" disbelief (as if someone who heard me talk would be able to divine my social security number  :roll: ) and the continued iterating of Diku in this genre. I haven't parsed log data, well, ever really, except when I was building EQ2 maps and spamming /loc (among other things (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=110)).

Shadowbane and EQ1 both had Mac clients, though barely supported and rather buggy if I recall. Second Life's and A Tale in the Desert's work pretty good though from what I hear. Except for SB though, none of thse really require TS.

That's the same reason why the mass market does not want a skill-based (as in player skill) MMO because deep down people are afraid they won't be any good at the game and will not have any fun. Hotkeys anyone can do, hell, look at me!

Cases in point: Pacman and Street Fighter 2.

Oh wait...

Apple meet Orange. 

Guilds are RETARDED. Players in WoW are generally retarded.

I had similar problems and luckily I've been able to find a guild on my server that does MC, Onyxia and ZG successfully and is on the way for BWL without using any kind of voice chat.

The problem is just about having people accept to do that without being babysitted through voice chat.

It's a problem of PEOPLE, not of the game.


No, these reasons are childish.

It's true that the voice chat may help to react quickly in some situations, but for sure it isn't required and not as important as these spoiled kids think. WoW raids are NOWHERE hard or more complicated than what you can find in other games. It's the people that are retarded and unable to follow orders without you yelling right in their ear.

Again. A problem of people.

Finding a decent guild is hard to impossible, but once you are set you'll be happy.

If you have a Mac and are complaining about gaming, then you have no one to blame but yourself. You should be thanking the gaming gods that Blizz deigned to make a Mac version and stop complaining.

Possible solution: buy a cheap Windwos desktop for $300 on eBay and run Teamspeak through it. You probably paid a $500 price premium to get a Powerbook so maybe money isn't a big issue. Yes, this will make it impossible to use TS when you are "mobile" but raids aren't conducive to being mobile anyway.

After my Planetside year, I'm amazed anyone can play a PvP game without Teamspeak or Ventrilo.  I thought that was one of the reasons why many MMOs never go to Macs, because the endgame addicts almost always use Win or Linux.  .


I don't recall all that many scripted raid encounters before WoW.  WoW raids may be _smaller_ then other games (I'm fairly certain they top out at 40 people in WoW), but given how soft certain classes are, managing hate/threat in a raid encounter is a performance art.  If you don't have voice to coordinate that, you better have one hell of a pile of macros.  WoW might not have the 'hardest' raids, but they aren't exactly easy. 

You never did any EQ raids.  Starting with PoP, maybe Luclin, all the bosses had scripts.  At x% of life y happens.  If you don't do abc before xyz you can't kill the boss at all. 

I did the first ZG boss with my PvE guild on Monday.  Aside from the fact that they've never raided, Vent didn't help anything for the exact reason Hrose mentioned, and the scripting wasn't any harder than what I saw in EQ.  It is, however, outside the realm of experience of most WoW's players, since for a large portion of them this is their first MMO.

No voice chat for me.

A) I'm not sure I could keep from waking up my wife and child at night while I shout profanities into a headset, and

B) I often sneak in a little playtime during slow periods at work (C'mon, who among you doesnt?), and my boss would get a wee bit testy with me if he heard me going on a raid during office hours, and

C) My brain would melt down from trying to telepathically explode people's heads in an effort to shut them the fuck up

My hypnotherapist has blocked out all memory of EQ.

Seriously, most of EQ's scripted encounters, IIRC, were only during boss battles.  I thought EQ was garbage long before I got to endgame (during 98-99, which I think is pre-luclin and pre-planes anyway), so all I have are secondhand accounts.  But even then, those stories mentioned use of macros for actions.  WoW's threat model means that you have to focus enemy attention on the tanks, which really throws most macro schemes out the window.  Your casters can't macro when they want to avoid threat, and your tanks can't macro because they need to be able to react when a monster's attention shifts.

In WoW, the nice thing is that you can get up to the level cap without ever touching voicechat: most of the instances up to the 'training for endgame' ones (Zul'Farrak, Sunken Temple, Mauradon) don't need voicechat at all.  But once/if you start seeing the 20-40 man instances, there's too much going on.  You notice a big shift when you go from a pickup raid group where people are typing like morons to a reasonably-disciplined voicechat channel in an invite-only raid.  The same holds true for most WoW PvP, especially in the population-controlled battlegrounds.

I guess that's a difference then.  WoW doesn't require you to do raids that same way EQ assumed you would.  But just because you can avoid something doesn't make it simple.

My point isn't that voice chat shouldn't be used. Just that people who cannot or doesn't want to use it should be ALLOWED TO PLAY ANYWAY.

The problem is that from what I saw there's NOTHING in the endgame raid in WoW that is sensibly harder than what I found in other games. There's a better and polished use of the structures you see in other games but I hardly found something directly new or different. It's really all just about positioning, aggro management and some timed spells you have to react to.

What THE SINGLE PLAYER has to do during one of these encounters could be summarized in one line of text. In fact I could doze off in a raid thanks to the minimal impact of what I'm supposed to do. The problem is about NOT DOING something that can break the raid.

This is why 95% of the actual difficulty of a PvE raid is about making 40 people *behave* properly and not decide what to do on their own. The Voice chat is a slightly better way than text to do so but it's NOWHERE an actual requirement. Having 40 scripted puppets would be infinitely more easy than having 40 *real* players with you. This is the reality.

Chances are that those who cannot use voice chat will naturally pay more attention and follow orders precisely because they are conscious about their limit. If the encounter goes wrong it's for completely different reasons.

The only reason why the voice chat is *obligatory* it's because people are lazy and usually want to impose that lazyness on everyone else. Then they made up excuse to justify that. Like that WoW requires "skill". Hahaha.

Rhonstet,

Regarding raids, nothing there is substantively any different than EQ's raids.  

That said, PvP does give a major advantage to the voice-chatters, since "live" combat situations lack the predictability of raid encounters (which can almost be done in one's sleep, once the gimmick is figured out and strategy set for it)

In WoW?

Come on. In AB I could build 4 macros for each spot if I'm really THAT lazy to not be willingly to type the few letters to define a location. And I would be set.

The problem is again about taking decisions and have people *follow* to them. NOTHING ELSE.

Another commonplace absolutely false.

It was really harder to do those 5-man instances at the *proper levels* with even parties than every other raid I joined.

5-man instances need a lot more initiative and attention from each participant. They are directly HARDER gameplay wise. They don't result harder in reality just because you don't have the added problem of babysitting 40 unruly kids.

In fact raids are the opposite of 5-man. You *don't want* players to take the initiative.

Depends on how you're pvp-ing.  If you just need to say "reinforcements at X", then a macro is fine.  If you need to say something on the spot like "Lone rogue stealthed near Mor'shan rampart, engaging...no, wait, full group coming out from behind terrain (yes, I'm a sucker), fighting anyway...dead, group heading towards Ashenvale" (my last ganking, fwiw) then it's a fuck of a lot easier to just say that *while continuing to fight* and have someone respond in time to be useful.

Inc Morshant. Full group.

Regroup Ashenvale.

You don't need to describe the colors and textures on your enemy while you PvP.

And then something else happens that requires a spur-of-the-moment change.  Yes, I *can* type all that shit out through all the combat spam, and then hope someone else is able to read it through their combat spam, and hope something more-or-less useful gets done at a vaguely appropriate time.

For a scripted event of timed button-mashing, it doesn't matter what the hell you use.  Trained monkeys pushing buttons for bananas might even be superior to thinking people; at least monkeys only fling poo IRL instead of on your raid.

But for a fluid and random situation (read: not WoW BGs), voice is superior, allowing you to react to unscripted, unpredictable elements without compromising your own performance.

Now, if all you truly want to argue is that it's not absolutely required, then I agree with you--you can do without it.  I don't have it, and won't, and I take the performance hit without griping.  But you will do better with it, don't pretend otherwise.

Stop being a faggot. You don't HAVE TO type out certain things, but why fucking bother when you can press a single key and hold it down for 5 seconds while talking?

It's not our fault you sound like Patty from Doug.

Oh snap!

What he said ^^^^.

The real reason I don't like to use VC much with random people? Because random people tend to err on the side of stupidity, and I really don't want to listen to them.

Also, who are you kidding?
 
This is the same raid paradigm in every game ever. Tank holds agro, everyone else tries to not overdo their thing so as to gain the mob's attention. WoW's content is no more difficult than that of any other game. There's not a ton of individual player skill needed to do these things; you need one person to keep everyone else in line, and that's it. If everyone does their "job" you win.

Wow, that's never been said before.   :roll:

My point is that voice chat is an ease. Players love eases. But this ease doesn't allow you to reach something that is unaccessible in another way. And it doesn't allow you to win an encounter you wouldn't win anyway.

When there's a fight and you have to fight. There's no reason to have a chat. In text or in voice. When you are dead at the grave you have plenty of time to write what you need.

That's my point of view. And in my experience having to read the chat and be aware of it helps a lot to keep the players awake and alert.


Because you should read before replying. I'm not saying that voice chat is useless or equal. I just say that it isn't as obligatory and fundamental as others claim.

It's not about convincing people to not use it. It's about convincing people to let play those players who cannot use or do not want to use this ease.

If I can talk on vent and 38 other people can hear me, would I rather have another person listening to me, or would I rather have to type it out for that one person's benefit?

Yes I've had raids wipe because a single guy forgot to log onto vent.

I did 5 man groups exlusively to level up in WoW.  It was so much fun since it was our regular 5 and we've been using TS for years.  When I started doing MC runs, I stayed away from the main raid Vent server because 40 f'cking peeps in an unregulated channel sucks the shit tea.  But MC gets to the point where all the encounters become rote, all thanks to the proliferation of raid mods.

I'd rather boot someone for not using RaidAssist.  It's that bad.

My old RP guild in UO used to have maybe two dozen people in Ventrilo on a good night.  When it was three different channels with eight people each, that was fine.  When we were fighting a guild war and all two dozen people were piled into one channel screaming "HEAL ME!" and "KILL SO-AND-SO!" I tended to just mute the whole thing and play it by eye until the fight was over.

Whether or not Voicechat is an ease, or it's required, or people could use hierarchical menus to get soundbytes (ala PS) is irrelevant in that its forever arguable.

What actually matters is the rules players set. You can mock and sneer all you want, but if 39 people use Voicechat for Raiding or PvP or just dicking around at the Auction House, the 40th person is going to use Voicechat too.

Players make the rules. Everyone else decides to follow them or gets excluded.

Well, it's been said a million times, yet the typical player who signs up to play WoW or whatever stil doesn't seem to quite realise that cat herding is one skill actually tested by the game. And unfrotunately will whine like buggery when content is put in that actually requires that skill


I have no idea why they don't but on the whole they don't. At the very least if someone doesn't find a way to make failing that challenge fun, then your server population dries up pretty quick.

Life. It's not just for breakfast any more. :roll:

Before I had a microphone, I would communicate over Ventrilo via the Schwarzenegger soundboards (http://www.ebaumsworld.com/arnolds.html) at Ebaum's.  I obviously couldn't use them while doing anything in the game, but I could hold a surprisingly solid conversation once I got good at it.

Sure. Maybe for PvE, I wouldn't know about end-raiding, I think that's some shitty gameplay.

But for PvP? I call bullshit on you. A guild with TS on will crush more often than not. When I was playing in my BF1942 clan, we fought one team that didn't use TS, utterly and easily destroyed them, even though they were good players otherwise. They got beaten so many times, so easily, they eventually dropped out of competition, because they refused to use voice comms.

For PvP, voice comms is essential. Period.
Your guild was undisciplined and disorganized. You should break into small squads, with only the squad leaders able to hear each other. Piling into one channel and screaming...why even use voice comms?

I think people who play games DO want a challenge. Shit, SOLITAIRE is a challenge, just not much of one. Everybody's level of desired challenge is different. I think most people don't want a challenge they don't think they can overcome, and with MMOG's, there is so much stacked against the player to begin with, that many take the shortcuts and get used to them that eventually they have removed the challenge of whatever they were doing because of the piled-up shortcuts.

Hrose, you are retarded in some fashion I have not yet been able to classify if you truly believe that PVP without voice chat is in anyway comparable to PVP with voice chat. Since Shadowbane it's been obvious that success at group-based PVP almost requires that you break out of the chat box.

Exactly. Heck, even in just textchat for Raiding, conversations are broken out by specialty, even if there's just a Heal Rotation channel.

The speed and type of collaberation is defined by the participants. If your Raid doesn't need voicechat, then it doesn't need voicechat. If your Raid requires CT_Raid 1.4.1.1 (addon for WoW), then you're going to get CT_Raid 1.4.1.1 or you will not be on the Raid. If the opposing team in PvP is using Teamspeak, whether it's stats- or skill-based, either your side is a hive mind or you're going to use Teamspeak.

It's really just that simple. It doesn't matter what should or could be. It only matters what is, and what is is defined by who's there at the time.

I am another of those Mac users without voice chat. Can't wait for Ventrilo/TS to get 'er done.

In the meantime, I went on a MC raid awhile back that required TS. I didn't have it, they let me go anyway. HRose is right in that it makes people lazy. I specifically asked questions about what needed to be done and when. Noone answered in text. I stayed clueless.

At one point, I was standing inside the corpse of a gaint dog thing. Another dog thing is coming. People are yelling to back up, but only one had the foresight to type back up. Sadly, he didn't specify which direction as I was facing the raid and away from the dog. Raid wiped.

I figure if you have time to discuss the strategy of the next fight on TS, you have time to type it out too.

As far as pvp, Voice definitely gives the edge to people who want to work out strategies for their group on the fly. In a large scale BG type setting, you don't really need it though as long as someone is directing traffic in chat. For small group vs group stuff, it gives the edge that results in the group without it dying.  Best thing about dying in BG's is the timer on the graveyard gives me a chance to type out info to the raid to let them know what is going on where I am.

From what I have read, it would not be impossible to integrate voice chat into a game like WoW. Especially if they used the expertise of TS/Ventrilo programmers to make it consume as little bandwidth as possible. The problem, as was pointed out recently on a blog I read, is that it can't be monitored like chat logs can so that profanity can be filtered or logged in a small byte width so that the information can be used later to penalize negative behavior. But, just because we can't do that now, doesn't mean someone won't figure it out.

I could easily see each stream of voice data being digitally marked to indicate who sent it and being saved on a huge server(s) somewhere. Provide the option in game to use it or not as an additional, nonmandatory type of chat. Only allow it to be used in conjunction with Group/Guild/Raid chat, i.e. only those people would hear you. Be able to /ignore someone and not hear their voice stream. It could be done.

As far as the whole Mac users are lucky because we got WoW, Blizzard has pretty much simultaneously released all of their games on both Mac and PC as far as I can remember. This was no different.

EQ for the Mac was my first MMO. The main reason most EQ'ers didn't know it existed is that 1.) it wasn't sold in many retail stores, 2.) we played on our own Mac only server, Al'Kabor, 3.) We had such piss poor support from SOE for so long that we had our own forums (http://www.eqmac.com) (Funny thing there, the official forums were broke, so we couldn't log into them with our Mac user accounts except to change billing info), 4.) Our last expansion was Planes of Power and we had no upgrades for like 2 years (no bug fixes, no code support). About 2 months before WoW came out, they finally gave us a programmer who quickly went ahead and fixed the Sound bug (memory leak) that the players themselves found the actual fix for and then fixed Hollowshade Moor so that the three critter war out there wasn't broken anymore (No boss mobs would spawn so letting the mobs make the whole zone one type of critter meant it stayed that way until a server restart).

Quite frankly, I wanted to play SWG. A lot. I am a huge fan. When I heard SOE was making it, I knew 2 things about it: No Mac Support and they are going to ruin a game and a license that could have been great. From what I have read, I was right.


If everyone stopped complaining because they were having a problem, nothing would ever get fixed.

Most people don't buy their Macs for games. They buy them so they can have a complete computer that can do anything they want to do. And it will last for a long while and hardly ever get broken.

There are a lot of games I would like to play. Some aren't made for the Mac. There are some developer companies out there that port them over so we can have them. Most of the time, they port the best PC games over so that we can share the love. Mac Gamers consider the PC market like a giant Beta test. We get the best stuff most of the time, it just takes awhile for the best to filter out.

Now if Microsoft would just stop buying out our developers, we might have some great platform specific games again (like Halo). Damn Bungie...

Listen to H, everyone.  A challenge is great, but at the end of a day where I have been fighting against enterprise-level NPCs with names like "Oracle" and "SAP", I don't want to go home and have my ass kicked by another undocumented computer glitch.  I don't want to sit on a six-hour raid with sixty nutgobblers trying to squash a creep after spending all day beating the shit out of our tape-storage subsystem because it won't give me my damn data.  I want to play something mindless and fun; you know, escape from stressful resource management and forced cooperation with a team.  I realize that I am not the gamer I once was when I start putting games like Advent Rising on easy-mode, but the alternative is a broken controller and RAGE.  I would like to postpone that heart attack as long as possible.

If you want to make a game more challenging, fine.  Forcing people to type instead of play, in order to communicate in a TEAM game is fucking tedious.  That gets in the way of gameplay, it doesn't promote it.  Nevermind that chatbox editing controls are extra shitty... arrow keys for the lose.  Skip it all and get voice, or get pwned.  It's a new age, motherfuckers.

I'm agreeing with you, Yeg. The challenge I'm talking about is not overcoming the downright shitty shit shit shittiness of the chat interface. With EQ raids, that was the biggest challenge to the whole thing, finding a way to organize and communicate with what could generously be called a tin can and a piece of string.

I want a challenge that involves gameplay, not gathering together 40 flesh bots.

Hehe, he said fleshbots...

Seriously though I'm going to chime in and say if you have EVER played a CTF fps whether it be one of the Tribes series, Outwars, UT or Quake you know that there is no opition to use voice com, unless you like having your ass handed to you.

It fails.

Anyway, on the topic of voice chat, I distinctly agree that it's not necessary.  Useful?  Yes.  Necessary?  Nope, not even in PvP.  What do you need?  People that will follow orders.  Immediately.  Without question, arguing, delaying, etc.  Just recieve their orders and act.

An example.  EverQuest: Omens of War.  One of the more 'difficult' trials was the Trial of Foresight, where you get...uhh, I think it was 40, people together and try to kill a bunch of dragorns.  During the fight, random people get messages telling them to do things.  The tasks they were told to do were generally simple.  Doing them means avoiding damage.  The dragorns themselves were of no actual challenge: the only challenge in that fight was getting the entire raid to actually do what they were told by the emotes.  Duck, move, stand still, go north, south, east, or center, unequip your weapon.  To this day it is considered a significant challenge.  Why?  Because 40 people aren't smart enough to do it.  A raid of BOTS programmed with MacroQuest could execute that fight without a single casualty.  Somebody could, with enough effort, write a macro that would do it.  All it would have to do is respond to the commands given it and do DPS that is greater than the dragorn's regen.

People that follow orders immediately and unquestioningly are the holy grail that every raid leader seeks.  Usually you'll have a couple in any given guild, but you could spend a lifetime trying to form an entire raid of them and never succeed.  But give me 20 people that do what I tell them instantly and without question, and with some practice and training, I will take them up against an average band of people using voice chat and own them.  Because the advantage the people using voice chat have is thus: they argue faster.  And the leader can yell loudly.  But if it takes me a couple extra seconds to type a command, that's fine, because it'll take *them* a couple extra seconds to argue about the command their leader just called out.  And while they're arguing, my team is unquestioningly obeying the command.  HRose is absolutely right - the people are the problem.  Get people who understand and are willing to follow chain of command during battle without delay or argument, and you win.

The exact placement of the line between "useful" and "necessary" is left as an excercise to the reader.

Hey! And it's not even raging douchebag week...

This is a topic about voice chat, not platform demagoguery.

That said, if you're using TS for WoW PVE, you fail at MMOs. We took down everything and anything in the EQ endgame without TS or vent and we did it handily, it took trial and error and discipline, but it worked. Even PVP can be handled by people that actually have a clue about what they're doing in game without voice. Is it a helpful tool? Sure, I've seen some of the most successful squads in PS use it and absolutely dominate as their coordination helped five or six guys hold off dozens in base raids and the like. But it should never be a barrier to entry for content. There's enough of those in the games themselves already.

Er, yes... until you run into a bunch of people who are disciplined _and_have voicechat. Please, communication is always better than no communication.

 - meg

Interesting thread. I'll refrain from commenting, since my perspective is highly distorted. I will say that when I spoke to the GL of the first guild to down Ragnaros, I was shocked to find out they did not use any sort of voice communication. The opposite was the case for the first guild to down Nef. They have TS as a raiding requirement.

So what hardware do you guys use for Voice chat ?

A mic.


Actually, I have two sound cards in my computer, so I like to pipe the sounds from the game to my desktop speakers and then I use the other card for my mic and headphones. Ventrilo is my prefered voice chat software. (The headset with attached mic that comes with Guild Wars collector's edition seems to work pretty well).

While I think you can certainly play the game without voice chat software, it does make it a whole lot more fun. Some of the folks I end up playing with just can't read chat and walk at the same time. You could be SCREAMING for help in groupchat and they'd never see it. Plus it makes banter back and forth a lot easier while you are all off shopping or messing about.

So very true. If I wanted to be confronted to human stupidity, I would simply go outside. At least with text chat, they have to type.
Moreover, insults and bad language is just not my cup of tea.

I will avoid any MMORPG that has voicechat as a requirement to play.

d

Could you explain how this works a bit more? What if I have onboard sound? How does the PC know which one to use?

In ventrilo setup you can tell it specifically which device to output to and which device to accept input from. In control panel, sounds and audio devices you would set your "preferred device" to the desktop speakers, then check the box to 'use preferred devices only'.

Then in Vent, you'd tell it to use the other sound card.

My logitech headset just busted a few days back and I picked up this plantronics headset (http://headsetinnovations.com/cart/product.php?productid=16324&cat=512&page=1) for $20. It works great for the price.

OSX TeamSpeak client in beta (http://www.savvy.nl/blog)

Ok, I have enabled Speex codecs on the Bat Country TS server. I will change some channels over to the new codec and see how it sounds.

209.59.137.153:7654 p: catass2victory

Nice one. Thank you Lum.

Well this is certainly a slap in the face of the TS guys. TS3 is in development for the better part of three years now and the release date got just recently pushed back to Q3 of 2006. They basically have nothing to show, no beta not even an alpha. They recently posted some sort of "what feature would you like to see on teamspeak 3" post on their webpage which leads me to think that they have not even begun serious development yet. Basically it is just vaporware.

They repeatedly stated that the development effort was hard because they basically would have to rewrite everything from scratch in C++ (They used delphi/kylix for TS2) and that it might take a long time because until recently they were doing it only in their free time (they were university students). Apple even donated several Mac systems to the TS development effort to speed up a Mac port of the software.

This would not even be a serious problem if TS was an open source effort, because everybody and their friends could fire up their editors to speed up development but TS is proprietary software. They want to make money of it and have declined every single help offer.I was one of the people willing to volunteer in the Mac porting effort. The developers are germans like me so making contact was easy. If they had released their source we would have a TS client by now. Actually the interesting part is their server-protocol the codecs they use, apart from GSM, are all LGPL anyway (Speex, CELP). GSM has licensing issues because Philips claims patents on the codec but there exists a reference implementation including source. So although Teamspeex is currently only using speex as codec, implementation of the other codecs would be possible which would make it fully compatible.

To make a long story short.

1. Teamspeak uses open source codecs/codecs where source can easily be acquired (google is your friend and a proprietary client-server protocol with a proprietary gui.
2. The hardest part in porting TS to the Mac is reverse engineering the protocol. (I tried it but I lack experience doing something like that)
3. The teamspeak guys weren't able to do something in three years which this developer achived in only a few months.

Sorry for the rant.

Well the teamspeak guys didn't take long to reply (http://www.savvy.nl/blog/2005/10/16/teamspeex-open-beta/):

"I was contacted by the company that represented the sales and marketing of TeamSpeak via email yesterday. I will not go too deep into the details, but basically they told me I had two options:

    * Based on my actions they may either choose to take legal action on me,
    * Or I can choose to cooperate and work together with them so that I may make my client available as an unsupported client for Mac OS X.

I have told I choose the latter, which is to cooperate but i’m not sure what that means from their end. I’m still waiting for their reply…"

Meanwhile, that link seems dead now.  Not that I use MacOS X, but I was curious about it.  It's completely gone from the intarweb now.  Well, google cached it, of course, but a few days ago.  Nothing recent.

Alkiera

Wow, those teamspeak guys sound like dicks.

I took the plunge and got Teamspeak totally wired up on the wife's machine for her raids.  It took bloody ages (it seemed) to get the sound going through the SB normally, but putting the TS through the nvidia and then getting the headphones and microphone to an acceptable sound level, but it worked.

Then I bought myself a more expensive headset so I could do the same to mine only to find that WoW crashed with my secondary soundcard (ac97 chap) and that the headset I bought, though more expensive, was total shite.

I am a little deflated over the whole thing, but I have satisfied the wife and that's the main thing, eh ?

According to her: yes.


Are you saying that WoW was having problems with you running your onboard soundcard with TS or were you trying to use your onboard card for WoW?

I honestly wish I could tell you mate.

Basically, I use a SB Audigy 2 and the onboard nvdia on my Asus board.

She uses a SB Live and the same.

Her WoW Never crashes.  When I enable my on-board sound, mine does.  Frequently.  And I have been testing this since WoW came out - It IS when I enable the onboard sound.  Blizzard Tech support say that there seems to be a problem with a lot of users and the AC97 onboard sound and it just depends on your luck.

Mine is apparently bad.

So, she gets wow through the speakers and her TS mates in her headphones.  I get crashes if I try to be that clever.

Arg.

To answer your question :  WoW Sounds goes through the card.  TS Sound through the onboard.  That's the goal.

Well, how would you feel if some lone coder just blew your bullshit excuses for being a slacker right the fuck out of the water?

I'd raise prices.

Ah, the Microsoft Gambit.

I have the same problem, except it nearly always works the first time I start WoW and nearly always fails the second time.  I just figured I was paying the price of running WinXP X64 Pro over an nvidia motherboard (DFI LANparty).

Holy crap people are still arguing about voice chat?  How is this even as issue?  Anybody who has played the end game of any recent MMO with even the most half-assed guild will know better.  Saying "I don't like to use teamspeak" will get you on my sketch-list real fast.  You're just automatically sketch for refusing to use it.  There's no compelling reason not to use it except 1) You don't want to blow your cover (you're a dude with a female character) or 2) your voice is gay.  No serious raiding guild will allow you to raid without teamspeak.  Fuck, if you want to be sneaky about it, just use the old chestnut "I don't have a mic."  Then you can listen in without exposing yourself. 

But seriously, even if you have a superiority complex and think everyone in your guild is stupid, therefore refusing to use teamspeak, you're just an asshole.  Because then,  someone has to specifically type out longwinded directions for every encounter to some shitty paladin who is raiding MC for the first time, bitches about the RPP system not being fair, and thinks he's better than everyone else.

If you're just one of those people who like to tool around solo or with a small group of friends then disregard what I just said.

Some posts are just really entertaining imo.

Sigh.  Reinstalled everything last night.  OS, drivers, the lot.

I just crashed out.

I'm really close to fucking hitting someone.

Heh, thats funny. People allways want me to give some Arnold quotes on vent because they claim I sound like him. I'll have to use some of that next time.

Make sure that when you enable your on-board sound card that is it NOT set as the default sound card within your control panel. This includes stuff like mic, midi sounds, hardware accelerator. All of those should be set to your SB card. (Or try the other way around - doing your onboard card set to default for *all* options and try to use the SB for TS - though it sounds like WoW is trying to use your onboard card when it shouldn't).

Don't try to get TS running with WoW yet, just try to get WoW running with your onboard sound enabled in the bios.

Oddly enough, I seem to have got it to work now.  It ran fine all last night without a single crash, which surprised me.

The solution appeared to be resetting the board to it's defaults (which brought in the firewire and other network card; I had disabled them) and it runs now.  The TS works fine too.

Now all I need is a new headset with a decent mic (one that doesn't pick up everything including my stomach growling) and I might even be happy for once smile.

Strange solution tho.  Still not sure WHY it worked.  Possibly the other NIC pushed an IRQ around or summat.

I need to get a decent system for TS, too. That's why I don't use it currently. Need a wireless headset, preferably sans earphones, though I guess segregating TS to the earphones would be nice. Sometimes sitting 10' away from the pc has its own problems...

Or get a mic stand and use my shure sm57, though for some reason it wasn't sounding good according to some folks here who were on way back when I tried getting it going.

If you have a laptop that can do wireless, you could plug your mic and headset into there.. thats what I did for a bit before I bought the second sound card.

Obviously, if you don't already have a laptop laying around gathering dust, there are cheaper ways to do it.  :-P

My computer is wired. I'm not :P

But yeah, running a cat5 to my old dusty laptop might not be a bad idea...hrrmm....

Evidently, the agreement with the TS guys is now in force. Night before last a guildmate of mine noticed the new link at the TeamSpeak website. I downloaded the new client, fired it up, connected to a server, bad codec. Tried a different server and it worked. I could hear people talking!

I have no mic/headset, so I just listened. Fun! Got to listen to another guild's drama for a little while which was fun in itself.

DRAMA FTW! (I think that is why TS is required, cuz they sure weren't talking about the raid we were on)

My guild uses Teamspeak to do online Karaoke and other things that amuse 18 year old stoners. We do MC instructions in raid chat via the WoW client. We require only the use of CT Raid. Some people think that voice chat makes them better able to handle dynamic encounters, but it really just caters to whiny little retards that want to be heard.

You mean like official MMOG Message boards?

I'm currently back on Win32 for mmoging but i remembered this thread as i had the same issue when i was only on my pbook. THere is now a beta 3rd party app for TeamSpeak for Mac users: http://www.savvy.nl/blog/download/ I've heard it works ok. At least a solution for OSX users in a TS guild, i know ventrillo has OSX client in the pipe...

Ventrilo's OSX client's already in beta. I'm using it, but not a lot.