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Voice Chat vs Typing in MMO's
Arioc
Member Posts: 299
I was talking with some friends and we realized we had differing opinions on the play experience that voice chat creates. Now I'm 29 and have been playing MMO's for a long time (I won't bore you with a litany of games I've played but I was playing online back when they were MUDD's).
My friend however is 24 and began playing MMO's not too long ago, starting with World of Warcraft. When we talked about our play experience he described the qualities he liked and viewed the game as a video game, talking about the MMO as if it's a console game. He loves voice chat, can't see himself typing and although he agrees that bad mic's, soft talkers, loud rooms, and poor connections irritate him about voice chat, he just expects chatter to be part of the multiplayer experience.
Now from my perspective voice chatter is noise, I prefer typing because I can ignore the chat box if the group is prattling about sports or the color to paint the baby-room, anything I'm not really interested in. I can focus on the game play, what’s going on, and remain immersed in the game world. If that same conversation is blasting in my ear I can't ignore it, sure I can mute the people but then they’re offended when they're conversation is done and they tell me something game related and find out they're muted. I am not anti-social, quote the opposite I love MMO's for the guild banter, group chat and social dynamics. I just value the ability to ignore conversations I have no interest in by not looking at the chat box. With voice that's not really an option.
Ok that being said, I want to get to the point. My friend views MMO's like he views FPS's, the smack talk; random conversation and blather are part of the Halo 3 online play experience he's accustomed to. He doesn’t view MMO's as immersion, he loves Oblivion a and Morrowind and really gets into those games, sometimes lamenting that he wishes that MMO's were more immersive. When we spoke about how his expectations on what a MMO feels like were affected by the presence of voice chat, while mine began with typing we realized that we ultimately wanted the same thing out of the game. Socialization, immersion and banter, but our initial exposures to the games were so different due to the presence of voice chat and its immersion breaking presence that he was never able to really stop and notice things.
For a while I tried to play with voice chat and he with text, we both had some interesting results. I found my irritation with people went up fast, the chat tends to convey mockery and sarcasm well, and even some glee, but it's not the same as hearing the inflections in people's voices. I found that allot of people were a bit crueler when they can say it, rather then type it.
My friend found that without the constant sound of talking in his ear he payed more attention to the world the game was set in. He didn't have to watch chat like a hawk, but was able to pick out the phrases quickly he had interest in and ignore the others.
I can't say either of us has changed our preference in game play but it was an interesting experiment and we both agree that the presence of immersion breaking elements have a strong factor in conditioning players and establishing their expectations for how a game should "feel". Almost like a child under the age of 5 who rely heavily on the opinions of his parents to mold his own values and opinions.
Just interesting, thought I'd post to get other people's views. This is not an anti-VoIP post, nor an anti-chat post, just an interesting little experiment we did.
Arioc Murkwood
Environment Artist
Sad but true.
Comments
I do a lot of pvp in mmorpgs, or raiding. I used to be all about role playing and immersion.
For immersion you cant really beat typing. All their voices in your head.. its just like how books are on a different level than movies. Your imagination does half the work.
Now for objective gameplay. You cant beat voice, and I think for getting a feeling of friendship and bonding you cant beat voice chat. Atleast with voice if you meet them eventually outside of the game, you know how they talk, and more about them generally.
For example I have one friend Ive gamed with for about 3 years now. In the first year we just played WoW together. I didnt even know about ventrilo, all my fps clans had used teamspeak.
In the first year I played with him almost every day.
Into the second year we started raiding more and PvP was introduced to WoW so ventrilo started getting more popular and out guild would always be on vent. Once I started actually talking to people, sure it was a lot harder to ignore the pains in the asses, but it started to feel like I was playing with real people.
I would consider him a friend. I would consider quite a few people from my guild, my friends.
To this day, if they just type.. they might as well just be an npc. But for me, when people talk on vent I see them more as real people and less like a little digital avatar. Thats the big thing for me...
That and it helps you compete better.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
Most of the time typing is just fine. There is more left to the imagination, and it is easier to RP.
But for raiding and doing complicated group quests, voice is better. It's just more practical to say, "Viper needs a heal," as opposed to being in the middle of battle, typing it, and then hoping someone is reading text. Most of the time when the poo hits the fan, people want to be focused on the on screen action and what they are doing not on the text window.
On a side note, my guild leader sounds like Jack Baur, which is cool.
Personally I prefer typing instead of voice chatting. I only use Ventrilo or other chat software if absolutely necessary. I don't know why but probably because I'm a shy person and I don't like talking to strangers on the internet.
its theese previous statement that make me want to cry as well when all theese games go to voice chat only i will again be left in a world with only a few voives to be seen
So when you debate theese points of view please realize that the effect are more then more efficient raiding and that personal relanship are built with a keyboard all the time
It seems that every voice chat orientated game that I have ever played, turns into nothing more than a racist chatroom.. Where some kid yells "nigger" then someone gets offended and strikes back or more kids start yelling it and before long the chat becomes an instant forum of hatred. And when I say EVERY voice chat, i mean EVERY one of em..
So to avoid ignorance, I turn voice chat off and prefer to make them type out there ignorance... at least they are at least inconvienced by having to type it all out....
But as far as voice chat in mmo's go, ONLY if I have been with the guild for a little while would I ever use their TS or ventrillo servers...
I personally am no big fan of voice-chatting. I been typing for 10 years in mmorpgs n done just fine. I am married with 5 kids. It is not so simple just to plop down in front of my pc, put on the headset n ignore everybody for a few hours. At least with text I can look away from they screen for a min, answer the phone n just scroll back to see what chat I missed. In Voice I don't have this option. So I miss something much easier.
Both serves their purposes, and there is no reason why one option must supplant the other.
Voice chats have their good uses. First in big raids, you need reaction fast, and you need real time coordination, say "everyone move off the platform NOW, the dragon is taking off". You need to be sure everyone knows, not everyone reads the chat every second during a big fight with a dragon. We healers never read the chat box, we have 24 hp bars to watch. To make chat useful, everyone must obey the rule, listen but not talk unless you are the leader/subleader, and no nonsense talk until the fight is over where everyone can cheer while we rez the dead and refresh buffs.
Small groups with good friends are good ways to link up a voice chat. Jokes and intimate talks are ok, b/c we know each other, and we are not going to insult each other. I won't insult my guild mates, they live next door and they have mean wives :-).
Voice is also good when I solo, I can talk to friends on and off, and no need to read the chat box. After all I am soloing, I only want to kill some time. I would most likely turn off the chat dialogue display and focus on game mechanics.
Typing is still the common platform for normal PUGs. Guess it will be so for a long time.
During rolls, I would just type this line: /random 100.
Outside raids I talked a lot though and with friends. With them there is no shyness.
First of all, that is an interesting experiment, thank you for sharing that Arioc. I agree that there are advantages and disadvantages to each, and each are due to the circumstance in the game. If you want to RP, it is a lot easier to type than to voice chat, because once you switch to voice the people become one step closer to reality, as others have already stated.. But I have to say that voice is also a key factor in competition as well as teamwork. You can't even PvP with a group in some games without Vent. Most of the battle no one is looking at the chat box, so it is obsolete; but you can't ignore the sound. It is the immersive part of a battle, and who role-plays during a PvP battle most of the time anyways? Not many..
I think voice chat will be implemented into the newer MMO's to come, just because of the practicality of it in most situations. You can still roleplay, and you don't always have to be in a voice chat if you don't want.
Voicechat is annoying to me beyond belief, i've played end game pvp in WoW and done the raiding bit, then returned also and went full on into end game arena and i've just never ever gotten to like voicechat.
Specially when there are mix ups with ingame voicechat and then some using vent. etc. having to turn off voicechat to use vent then turn off vent to use in game voicechat because group members may not have your vent channel, then factor in people that become your friends that are in your arena team but dont have permission to get the guild password for vent etc etc.
To be honest i just also dislike hearing the hordes of kids in one particular guild and their need to socialize with others in anyway they can or think is appropriate, turning guild chat into a version of kids in the eightgrade that are still amazed at cuss words or any reference to sexual jokes, mom jokes, Chuck Norris jokes etc. etc.
After all the end game and arena pvping, raiding etc. i'm just not into making the voicechat a big part of the game, i'll trade that off for immersion anyday.
Because the point of me being in a fantasy or sci fi world in the first, is not to fill it up with socializing that just isn't interesting to me in the least but with stuff in that world i'm drawn into.
No matter if you have friends or just people you just met on voicechat one thing is for sure that it becomes incredibly mundane.
In WoW for instance it was the voicechat that got people focussed and into the raiding or in the moment with the arena teams, which to me takes me instantly out of the feeling of a game and into this feeling of almost a 9 to 5 job like thing.
If the voicechat also had me in my character's voice then i'd maybe be more into it, but if people are left up to the task of creating the world they inhabit but have no reason to be there it's just a joke.
Like voicechat in AoC, gimme a break.
That world is detailed to the fullest. The world at every turn of your head is built around this fantasy lore that is pretty incredible. Seems super deep to me and i'd love to get in there and just feel like it's real for a minute, but insert that voicechat and i'm going to have to say i'll pass. I dont care if i can't raid with out it or pvp without it, etc. i'll do what ever i can to just avoid it from now on since i can say i've experienced it and how it changes whatever mmorpg i'm in by flooding in the randomness and mundane chatter that doesn't fit in game.
I'm supposed to be a warrior or some spell casting dead raising necromancer and then on voicechat you hear the voice coming through to you from another warrior that . . . seems to be someone detatched from the life of a "Conan" type man that has some immediacy in his voice some desperation as though his next breath could be his last, instead you get some "hold on", "brb" ,"need to grab a pepsi".
I could have shortened this post and spared all eyes from this mess and just said,
Whatever ! You just don't get it.
I'm somewhat anti social when it comes to voice chat. I'll talk with my small guild of friends on voice chat while gaming solo or in groups with others, but I don't really join other people's chat servers nor do I invite others to join my server unless I've gamed with them for some time and know them somewhat through talking with them via text chat. We are a group of adults so we don't invite just anyone to voice chat with us.
I've only joined other people's chat servers when I've tried raiding in WoW. I didn't talk much since I was trying to learn what to do from the raid leader and I didn't care for it much really. I'm just not into raiding like other people are. 3 or 4 hours or whatever of gaming in an instance is too boring for me. And being somewhat antisocial, I don't like to voice chat with a bunch of people I don't know from Adam.
This website is a safe haven for trolls and haters. I'm done with this pathetic site.
I use ventrilo even when Im not playing a game. My friends setup a server a few years back and its more of a social tool for us. We primarily used it for CS:S and BF2 but eventually we all hopped on the WoW bandwagon and it was a much better experience since you could have a full fledged discussion about things in-game. Many people quit WoW and moved onto EVE more recently. EVE is a lot to take in just starting out for the first time and having someone explain things to you rather than typing back and forth is much better. It is a shame that more guilds, orgs, what have you don't have a vent or TS server setup. Another major thing about voice is that its way more personal. Also its never fun scrolling through lines of text to find out what someone said while you were busy fighting something.
I do not play WoW any more, I gave up long ago. The community of WoW is somewhat lacking, and voice chats with non guildies is down right dumb to me. Raiding in WoW is a second source of disappointment, enough for me. I am done.
True, voice over kills immersion, but during critical moments, like raids, PVP encounters, immersion is thrown out of the window. One bad coordination, we are all out of the game, mass resurrection.
Voice chat with friend, RL ones in particular, is another issue. I would still enjoy voice chats outside raids, but only with friends.
At any rate, if you want to avoid the immature crowd, voice chat or not is not an issue. The chat box can be equally littered with dumb comments and immature comments. Find a good game, a good guild, or a good bunch of friends, and stick with them. That is the better solution to shutting off voice chat.
I personally despise voice chat in just about any game, especially nowadays. Not only do you have to listen to someone barking orders like some MMO despot, you also have to listen to inane, and annoying conversations - that usually have nothing to do with game play - that come in varying degrees of volume.
They both have their pluses. Voice chat is nice for communicating quickly and still having your hands free to play, but I like typing also so I can check the chat log after being afk. IMHO, typing will always be a must for general chat until games become so vast and immersive that you can only talk to the people nearby. For PvE, typing is fine as long there's some kind of sound emotes to wake up people like me who find PvE boring as hell. For PvP, on the other hand, I prefer to have voice chat.
Coming from a strong competitive FPS scene, I cannot imagine my computer without ventrilo open. I've been playing and talking with the same group for over 5 years now. We've been together in many different games and even when I play an MMO, I can still talk to my buddies that don't like MMOs.
Our usual crowd usually consist of about 20 to 30 people at night. Most of the time, everyone is playing something different but we do gather on one single game for a few hours each night. Back in the early days of SWG, ventrilo was not a very common software for many guilds but since our sites and ventrilo were sponsored we had access to it. In PVP, I must say that the first 3 months were amazing since no one really used voice chat, we often crushed everyone by simply reacting quickly to a situation.
I love roleplaying and I will always RP when I get a chance but like Xfire and MSN, my ventrilo is always on. When I go to bed, I simply drop my user in the AFK room and mute vent.
So my view is that I don't think I could ever tolerate being on my computer without Ventrilo. If ever I get tired of it, I just mute and enjoy games like Crysis or Unreal 3 with full sound.
Over the past few years, I've met alot of people that simply cannot tolerate voice chat and I can understand that. I think it's really just a habit... some people hate Xifre, while others have more people on it then MSN...
Only with RL people I know will I do voice chat. Nothing more annoying than some pimple faced geek screaming into the microphone like a little girl.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
Ohhhh, the classical discussion. Voice-Chat vs. Regular Chat. It's been a while since I saw a thread on that topic (and it wasn't even here).
Anyway, I'd like to point a few things out. Forgive me if I missed a major point, but I am going to sum up some of the standard things that are being thrown into discussions such as these on a regular basis:
1) Immersion for RP:
This is the reason that most RPers constantly state when they damn Voice-Chat to the nine hells and go to great lengths to tell people that it is not possible to have an immersive gaming experience while a group of people is chatting over the Ventrilo Server. The major point there is that so many female characters are actually guys and that that would kill any possible identification with the characters.
In my eyes, BS. Speaking from a RPers point of view (I've RPed P&P for well over 17 years now), I can't believe that many people considering themselves old-school RPers actually are so fond of this argument. I used to sit with 4 other guys around a table burdened with chips, soda and cigarettes, and one of these guys or more almost always played a female character. Now, if I can look into the face of a herpes-ridden, akne-infested youth and still immerse myself in the fictional world, how is a male voice going to kill Immersiveness for me?
The next thing under this subject is usually the Chit-Chat about OOC stuff in Voicechat. I can agree to that a little more, albeit I don't share the sentiment. If I am RPing, I can still talk with my freinds and people over Ventrilo without losing the fun for the game. I love to multitask anyway, maybe that's why.
2) Shyness:
Well, you can't really say anything to that. If someone is shy, that's for him to find out and you can't force someone to open up on a TS/Vent server. I personally have no problems with talking to just about anyone. As soon as they get annoying, I either tune them out, or I leave (since usually, if they are THAT annoying in Voice-Chat, they'll be just as annoying in the game).
3) Cooperation:
Of course, the main reason FOR Voicechat and one you can hardly argue away. In Raids and especially in fast-paced PvP, you can't beat a coordinated, Voice-Chat-using group. Typing takes away "finger"-time which you need to control the game. Simple as that. Of course, I am a firm believer that people knowing each other well and using simple, easy to understand Text-Chat will be able to achieve much the same, but that takes a lot to practice and get down since it relies much more on intuition and knowing each others playstyle than the other version.
Conclusion:
For me, Voice-Chat is a useful tool. I use it to stay in touch with friends and my girlfriend while playing or even just sitting in front of the computer. I use it for grouping in difficult situations and I use it for PvP. That said, I have my Voice-Chat almost always on and running in the background. That does not mean I do not type anymore. I still do that, particularly, of course, when RPing, since emotes and typing are a much better way to convey words and especially, actions in a MMO. So I will continue using both and enjoy both talking to others over Voice and RPing with others through Chat. ^^
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
I refuse to use voicechat. I have no interest in ruining immersion by hearing some snot nosed kid talk smack.
Who the heck has the time and patience to read all that gibberish in chat boxes? Its bad enough MMO's don't use voiceovers for thier NPC's. When you game with a regular group, Voice chat is the only way to go. (IMHO of course)
Guild wars has a cool idea of the ability to draw on the map your group see. This way you can just quickly draw where you need them and what to attack. Other then this yes, voice is the way to go.
SHOHADAKU
Bot have its place, but I have to admit I'm more of a typist kinda guy.
Wehn WW2OL was launched, my squad and I testerd out several types of voice chats for us to use.. We even ended up with a decent package of nice and organized rooms with a simple keymap for the squaddies to download from our web server even.
However, our surprise was big when we found that despite the amopunt of organizing WW2OL needed to run a squad to become one of the most effective and successful squads ingame, our voice chats was more used to banter, bragging and a few laughs than organising at all.
As a platoon leader in my squad, the type chat became essential, as it was quicker and more noticable for my troopers to use than voice.
If I wanted some of my squaddies to move 200m to the east and block a road... instead of explaining on voice, I just had to type "ZZ Denw2 200m e block" something that took me less than a second in calm conditions, 1.5 second in fighting conditions.
I found that we practicly made our own "lingo" for a immensely effective communication in the game.
For Veterans of WW2OL, my squad was the 31'st Wrecking Crew , tho we never got to raid paris in 24 hours, we did put a scare on our oponents and gained their respects...
Funny tho, that we a squad of hundreds, fighting hardcore PvP battles simultaneously in the air and on the ground, with tanks doing their job, artillery, Anti-Tank guns, transports, infantry managed to be more effective with typing than todays raid groups are with voice coms
Eve also has a good broadcast system that lets you direct your fleet with in game commands.
as for all the annoyances of voice, well I play with a tighter knit group that get along. Or for large fleets you need the comms clear other then commands. All other chat is done in chat window.
The bad voice experience your talk about is a example of how it is in undisiplined comms. Your just playing with the wrong people.
SHOHADAKU
personally i like it when there is only 1 person using voice chat in a group (the leader) i especially like it when (even without voice chat) only the leader types. the quiet playes are almost always the better ones that follow orders and do what they are told to do. i only use voice chat to listen and never speak on it. i try not to get dragged into conversations in text but sometimes its unavoidable (the tank wants a healing drop
for example) but to my guild i am more than happy to be the main conversation starter. i love chatting to my guild and friends but as soon as i am in a group not a peep out of me.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
If you actually know the people in the group voice chat is fine. Then its more about social contact than gameplay.
If you don't zzzzzzz.... all the mens voices sound alike over voice unless they have a strong accent. Its hard to tell who is talking. I hate hearing some big goof barking out orders. Alot of people jabber about nothing because they're so excited to hear themselves speaking. If people type they are forced to just say what needs to be said.
And I'm soft spoken so people can't hear me...so no real gain there.