Online-Games and the voice-chat segregation

[Nija]

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)

Inc Morshant. Full group.

Regroup Ashenvale.

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

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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!

[Strazos]

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?
 

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.

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.

[Rasix]

Wow, that's never been said before.   

[HRose]

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.

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?

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.

[Nija]

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.

[chinslim]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Venkman]

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.

[eldaec]

Wow, that's never been said before.

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

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?

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.

[Pococurante]

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

[WindupAtheist]

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.

Before I had a microphone, I would communicate over Ventrilo via the Schwarzenegger soundboards 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.

[Sky]

I just say that it isn't as obligatory and fundamental as others claim.

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.

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.

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?

[HaemishM]

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?

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.

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.

[Venkman]

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?

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.

[DevilsAdvocate]

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 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.

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...

[Yegolev]

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.

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[Hoax]

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.

[Koyasha]

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.

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.

[Yegolev]

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

[Surlyboi]

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.

It fails.

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.

[Megrim]

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.

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

[Malathor]

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.

[Ironwood]

So what hardware do you guys use for Voice chat ?

[Viin]

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.

[dEOS]

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.

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

[shiznitz]

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).

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

[Nija]

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 for $20. It works great for the price.

[Lum]

OSX TeamSpeak client in beta

[Shockeye]

OSX TeamSpeak client in beta

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

[Jeff Kelly]

OSX TeamSpeak client in beta

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

Well the teamspeak guys didn't take long to reply:

"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…"

[Alkiera]

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

[Sky]

Wow, those teamspeak guys sound like dicks.