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General: Vivox: Serving Chat in MMOs
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In her latest interview from this year's GDC Online, MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh caught up with Vivox Founder and Vice President of Product Management and Marketing Monty Sharma. A lot has happened in the world of MMO-based chat since 2006 and Carolyn has all the details. Check it out and then join the conversation on the forums.
Since EVE Online, Vivox voice chat has been integrated into Second Life, Fallen Earth, Atlantica Online and Global Agenda to name a few, and SoE’s products, including an announcement of a rollout of their HD (High Definition) voice chat in DCUO. With improved sampling rate, the new code also has better echo canceling and just better all-around Audio quality.
Read more Vivox: Serving Chat in MMOs.
Comments
Until integrated voice comms can truly give you the same feature set as Teamspeak mumble vent etc then I and the majority will continue to use external voice comms solutions.
I am yet to be a part of a guild/legion/clan call them waht you will that uses a games integrated voice comms.
Actually most of us said the same in APB, but.... at the end of the day most of us simply used the integrated voice comms and it was Vivox there as well. The benefits it offered out weighed that of team speak and Vent by to much.
The majority will use the voice that the game offers if its at least decent,. As it is while a large number do use Vent/Teamspeak the problem comes into play when you understand and realize that the majority of MMO players don't use any Voice comms of any kind. So you can't really say the majority will stick with team speak and Vent to begin with lol.
But yeah, this has already been tested and our theory of most will stick with Team speak and Vent was proven false because having everyone using the same voice comm and being able to hear those in close proximity turned out to be more appealing than what Vent or Teamspeak could offer.
Eve voice is badass. Much better implementation of in game voice then other games I have been in. One of the big reasons to do vent or teamspeak is to get all your guild on voice and not have to mess with forming groups. In eve you can just join alliance or corp voice channels for this.
I never knew any alliance that used the in-game chat with Eve. Most people avoid in-game chat for a variety of reasons. Suzie should have asked Vivox what they are doing to break the stigma that in-game chat has. "Voice chat has gained wide acceptance in the MMO world when integrated into the game." Oh really? Where are your statistics to back up that claim? How much to Vivox invest in advertising to get you to write this PR piece?
Personally I just avoid any guild or corps that use voice, it just ruins any immersion for me. Besides a cute female avatar with a guy's voice just does not hack it.
Oh and in Eve, I don't know anyone that uses the in game voice. Most of them use ventrilo. So much for Vivox being a mover and shaker, more like an also ran.
I've always used Vent or TS in EVE, Champs, and WAR. The voice fonts sound pretty awesome though. I sound like an orc or demon in RL - I have trouble with the humans and elves.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
As a small corp under 30 players there is really no need for a teamspeak or vent server.
I have never seen as good results for voice as Vivox in EVE. Using TS, Vent, or other clients (I haven't had a chance to use TS3 though). It is all me and my compadres use for small group comms in EVE.
I was thrilled when they started beta testing a dedicated client with the atrocious name of Voon, but when the sheets hit the economic fan and they had to stop developement before it built a big user base.
If you want you can still download and use it at voon.vivox.com but it is in beta and they aren't fixing anything right now.
I hope they come back and try again, because it was very promising and if they get it finalized and stable and start to give it a competative feature set, and especially if they can make it tie into ingame Vivox voice they could really have a killer app.
I will say this it beats having to have vent or ts up and running.
Hmmm, more than enough reasons against never using in game speech over ventrillo-
#1 I can chat with in game friends even if I'm doing something else. How many times has a scrim or raid been setup on the fly and you need to find out when it is? Fire up your web browser, search through your clan's forums and maybe someone bothered to list it, maybe they didn't. Start your game, login, choose a character and ask? Why not just double click and icon and push to talk?
#2 I can have 150 people in different rooms doing their thing and not worry about half of them trying to talk at the same time. The guy you need to talk to is in another group and group only is the voip they imploy? They also don't even need to be in the same game if the clan is multigame.
#3 Password protected rooms for competition.
#4 Most important of all, if a player is not smart enough to install and use a third party comms program even with help from guildies? Please join a carebear clan and hope you don't ever cross my group's path in PVP. Nothing like playing a team based FPS and trying to get your friends where you need them and getting to listen to some jackass playing music through his mic. I haven't had in game voice turned on in any game I play in a long ass time.
Maybe down the road if a game implements their voip in a way that perfectly mimics the depth of their text chat system I might be down with it but I haven't yet seen anything that lets players have the freedom to do what they want along with the from all the idiots that seem to populate most games out there in general chat.
we never used ingame voice in EVE. afaik such ingame voice tools are still not independent from the game. this means, you have to log into the game in order to use it. and this means in EVE: you are dead! 2 examples:
your team went into hostile territory to kill some guys. unfortunately this enemy is very well organized, blocks every gate and starts scanning your position. only chance is that everybody logs out in the middle of nowhere. just some stealth-pilots will stay online to report via teamspeak about the situation.
or you logged out at a POS in your safe bubble and log out in the late evening. enemy puts even more bubbles around it during night. if you log in next evening, you will end up in the hostile bubble and they will kill you. i saw hundreds of pilots dying this way in a few hours. thats why we had the rule: 1st go to teamspeak and ask about the situation. then log in.
as long as these tools are not independent from the game, they got a big, deadly disadavntage.
played: Everquest I (6 years), EVE (3 years)
months: EQII, Vanguard, Siedler Online, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2
weeks: WoW, Shaiya, Darkfall, Florensia, Entropia, Aion, Lotro, Fallen Earth, Uncharted Waters
days: DDO, RoM, FFXIV, STO, Atlantica, PotBS, Maestia, WAR, AoC, Gods&Heroes, Cultures, RIFT, Forsaken World, Allodds
I used EvE voice for Factional Warfare and Inter Corp/Alliance gangs so it's not without it's uses. The fact that you can see who's speaking (ingame name), as well as the fact that you don't need to share vent info (a security risk) is a big plus.
But on the other hand the one big advantage teamspeak/vent has is you can log in without being logged into the game, for example when a node crashes or something.
As for your typical MMORPG.. people are just too antisocial / shy whatever and you don't need that much cooperation in most content to need voice. You use voice for guild raids and banter but that's it.
In game voice chat is a good fall back if you are not using a 3rd party option. Voice morphing is going to be very big in the future, it allows a Orc player to sound like an Orc not the kid from next door.
Not sure I like the idea of the voice texts. The one good thing about voice chat is you know who is really a girl/guy/kid . With this those that pretend to be girls (or grown ups) can continue to do so. If I do voice I prefer to know who I am really talking to
there was a REALLY bad bug in the vivox chat service (for atleast EQ2) of which most people are unaware. I've experienced it personally twice, and have overheard conversations obviously not meant to be broadcast. When EQ2 crashes (which happens...) the voice service is still running, and worst of all it goes into a kind of 'voice activated' or 'always on' mode. This is on until you stop the service, or reboot, broadcasting everything that you say within voice range of your mic, be it a convo to your housemate, wife, girlfriend, whoever. It will also go to out to your last channel, be it guild chat channel, or raid or what. Last time this happened was approx 8 months ago, i guess it's possible it's been fixed. There arefurther threads about this on the EQ2 official forums, but not many people realise it happens
Nox
Meh, the proof is that there are several games using it already and in those games that it is offered it's used by the majority.
It doesn't suffer from the same restrictions that Vent and Teamspeak and similar programs suffer. Whether you are pugging it up or hanging with your clan/guild it's a useful tool where as Teamspeak and vent users have gotten fairly unsocial as of late, by that I mean pugging less and less or hanging out with those not in there clan/guild less and less. Those that use an in game system like Vivox don't suffer the same limitations of Vent and Teamspeak, no need to worry about giving them info and having to go through the trouble of helping them get it setup and working.
I personally don't see myself going back to teamspeak or vent after using the Vivox service in APB. Hassle free, and after using it I realized how anti social I had become because of vent and teamspeak lol. I had basically quit doing much of anything with anyone outside my clan/guild.
This is just me though, and my view is based on the fact that I pick MMO's over single player games for the community. Ignoring the rest of the community or treating them like NPC's if they aren't clan/guild mates kind of defeats the purpose lol.