Originally posted by ShakyMo How does "the audio of your personal life" get broadcast to some server?
You have to hold a key to talk.
They hold the key down. They aren't bright.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Talking is just so much better than typing. Also voice chat is a great social feature for groups. I don't see anything wrong with it at all unless you are an anti-socialist.
I found voice chat something that was hard to live without when raiding in WoW. Being able to call out stuff instantly over voice chat was so much more efficient than trying to type it out.
I'm going to be playing FF14: ARR and based on what I've seen of the battle it seems to be too fast paced to be able to efficiently play your class and type out things in between abilities. The guild I'm currently in are all old school FF11 people that never really used voice chat since you were auto-attacking over half of the time in that game, so they never felt a need to use it. I wonder if that mindset will change or not in the endgame content for FF14 if it requires a moment's notice to be able to react and call out things.
The only times I remember voice chat have been negative. Guild leaders REQUIRING it for raids so they can bitch people out for mistakes is not exactly what I call fun.
Indeed. I'd go so far as to say that the whole "voice tactical advantage" claim is more perceptual than actual. Because the games haven't changed from text to voice: it's all responding to visual cues from the screen and translating it to the hand.
In fact, physiologically speaking, a voice command of "hey I need a heal" slows down the reaction time of the healer from what it ordinarily would have been if the healer just looked at the party bar and reacted. Because instead of simply seeing who needs the heal, the person now has to spend some more fractions of a second hearing something orally, processing what it means, processing whether it is important, and executing it.
No, I'm convinced--just by the neurology of it--that the reason guilds require voice chat has less to do with making groups efficient. It has more to do with making the leader feel secure and ascribing blame. Because a good player is going to know what to do, instinctively, without being told just by looking at the visual data on the screen. But when we can tell everyone what they ought to be doing, it makes us feel more secure that things are going "to plan," and it also is a good way to ascribe blame when things don't go to plan.
In short, I think the voice "advantage" is more emotional than actual.
You're an example of someone who makes up facts to prove what he already believes. If you had ever actually done "serious" raiding..as in a group trying to do hard mode content ect you'd never even attempt to make the argument you've just made.
Good raid guilds don't have these meniacal raid leaders who need their ego padded constantly, or who throw tantrums all the time. That comes from people trying to perpetuate a stereotype so they can keep using it as an excuse.
Voice coms are required in raid guilds because no one wants to type out a short story before and after each attempt. It's very easy to miss a typed msg in the heat of combat. It's pretty hard for a good raider to zone out and miss a voice communication.
Voice chat has no place in MMOs....Its for the lazy and those who want everything to be turned into a social media circus....MMOs were meant to be typed period.
I am good friends with a deaf person who had to quit playing or convert to a solo play style because she now is unable to raid. She is an awesome healer, too, and back before all the groups she used to play with went to voice, she was usually the first picked for healing.
She's not one to scream "discrimination!" or anything, as she realizes she's in the minority, but it does kinda suck that she's excluded because the communication aspect has "evolved" outside the realm of what she's physically capable of participating in.
This is the most important reason to have a non-voice server in a popular game. All of the deaf players would flock to that server and yes there are quite a few people who are hearing impaired or deaf out there.
There are many legitimate reasons for refusing to use voice and raids CAN be done without voice. Problem is that the non-voice people are split among all of the servers and forced to comply or play at best on the low social level.
I would figure on a game with at least 12 servers, the non-voice server would end up the most populated server.
My solution would be to develop ingame voice chat to work along side your toon where a "voice to text" program would be very functional. Speak into the mic and your voice wouldn't be heard, but your toon would repeat it in a chat bubble or possibly in the group channel(or both).
This would allow a slight form of privacy for players plus if you could toggle it on or off as an option you would then have a choice.
Nice idea, but it might be hard to get it to be fast and accurate
The only times I remember voice chat have been negative. Guild leaders REQUIRING it for raids so they can bitch people out for mistakes is not exactly what I call fun.
Indeed. I'd go so far as to say that the whole "voice tactical advantage" claim is more perceptual than actual. Because the games haven't changed from text to voice: it's all responding to visual cues from the screen and translating it to the hand.
In fact, physiologically speaking, a voice command of "hey I need a heal" slows down the reaction time of the healer from what it ordinarily would have been if the healer just looked at the party bar and reacted. Because instead of simply seeing who needs the heal, the person now has to spend some more fractions of a second hearing something orally, processing what it means, processing whether it is important, and executing it.
No, I'm convinced--just by the neurology of it--that the reason guilds require voice chat has less to do with making groups efficient. It has more to do with making the leader feel secure and ascribing blame. Because a good player is going to know what to do, instinctively, without being told just by looking at the visual data on the screen. But when we can tell everyone what they ought to be doing, it makes us feel more secure that things are going "to plan," and it also is a good way to ascribe blame when things don't go to plan.
In short, I think the voice "advantage" is more emotional than actual.
You're an example of someone who makes up facts to prove what he already believes. If you had ever actually done "serious" raiding..as in a group trying to do hard mode content ect you'd never even attempt to make the argument you've just made.
Good raid guilds don't have these meniacal raid leaders who need their ego padded constantly, or who throw tantrums all the time. That comes from people trying to perpetuate a stereotype so they can keep using it as an excuse.
Voice coms are required in raid guilds because no one wants to type out a short story before and after each attempt. It's very easy to miss a typed msg in the heat of combat. It's pretty hard for a good raider to zone out and miss a voice communication.
Hey man, I'm sorry that we've had different experiences, but I've been in quite a few guilds in the past 12 years or so I've been playing MMO's, that have had bitchy, whiny raid leaders in voice chat. Just because you haven't experienced much of it doesn't mean it's not a regular occurrence.
At the same time, I'd be hypocritical to assume all guild/raid leaders are the same, so I understand where you're coming from. I suppose I've just had worse luck.
The only times I remember voice chat have been negative. Guild leaders REQUIRING it for raids so they can bitch people out for mistakes is not exactly what I call fun.
Indeed. I'd go so far as to say that the whole "voice tactical advantage" claim is more perceptual than actual. Because the games haven't changed from text to voice: it's all responding to visual cues from the screen and translating it to the hand.
In fact, physiologically speaking, a voice command of "hey I need a heal" slows down the reaction time of the healer from what it ordinarily would have been if the healer just looked at the party bar and reacted. Because instead of simply seeing who needs the heal, the person now has to spend some more fractions of a second hearing something orally, processing what it means, processing whether it is important, and executing it.
No, I'm convinced--just by the neurology of it--that the reason guilds require voice chat has less to do with making groups efficient. It has more to do with making the leader feel secure and ascribing blame. Because a good player is going to know what to do, instinctively, without being told just by looking at the visual data on the screen. But when we can tell everyone what they ought to be doing, it makes us feel more secure that things are going "to plan," and it also is a good way to ascribe blame when things don't go to plan.
In short, I think the voice "advantage" is more emotional than actual.
You're an example of someone who makes up facts to prove what he already believes. If you had ever actually done "serious" raiding..as in a group trying to do hard mode content ect you'd never even attempt to make the argument you've just made.
Good raid guilds don't have these meniacal raid leaders who need their ego padded constantly, or who throw tantrums all the time. That comes from people trying to perpetuate a stereotype so they can keep using it as an excuse.
Voice coms are required in raid guilds because no one wants to type out a short story before and after each attempt. It's very easy to miss a typed msg in the heat of combat. It's pretty hard for a good raider to zone out and miss a voice communication.
I've played in big raids enough to know that voice won't make you a superstar in your class.
The good players I've seen know what to do without ever having to be told. The not so good players? Well, they either have to tell others what they need or be told what they should do through chat or voice.
Mastering a raid is knowing how to read the action on the screen as it's taking place. Who says people have to communicate at all to get things done? Now I've been on raids, and one thing I can tell you is that people who know what to do just do it automatically, without having to be told by anyone.
Tankers tank the ones they ought, without having to be told. Healers heal the ones they ought, without having to be told. DPS throws DPS at the mobs they ought, without having to be told. And this is all done automatically, without anyone having to say word one or type word one.
And the good players adapt and change strategy, without having to be told, because they see the dynamics of the battle and change. They "flow like water" to use Bruce Lee's term.
You get an even better sense of this when you get a spontaneous GM event. There you get big pick up groups of all kinds, and they tend to self-organize better than any central organizer ever could. If a big, unrelated mob can self-coordinate like that, perhaps we underestimate the ability of people to play their classes in a team without having to be told what to do.
My group monitor and the visuals communicate a group better than the group members themselves. When you have people who know how to play, you don't have to type or to talk. You just look at your monitors and just do.
All the information a player needs to know is on the player's screen. The screen knows the status of the group better than the group members themselves. Because the heart of these games are still--even after all this time--responding to visual cues on the monitor. MMO combat has little to nothing to do with communication...unless you count the status bars as communication.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Originally posted by ShakyMo How does "the audio of your personal life" get broadcast to some server?
You have to hold a key to talk.
I dont know if you've voice chatted much but most times I have its a constant barrage of bs conversation that you basically have to respond to or be deemed impolite. So that push to talk is on more often then it needs to be. Its like the guy at the bus stop that wont stop talking to you. There is also often times to tell things that are longer then a few words, such as planning a large scale attack, hence background noise or such gets included (music, tv, talking, doing dishes, etc.) We are not all single men sitting in a basement, that can yammer on all day with strangers about nonsense. So every time I need to 'talk' on some stupid game I need to turn off my music/tv tell my wife to shut up, or kids, or dog, turn off the any noisy appliance and then say a few choice words? And I do hear this all the time in the background of other people using voice chat btw. Audio of their personal life, and you know what I am talking about so don't play dumb. Or on the flip side, what about times when quiet is needed, like a sleeping baby or wife, should I be there talking to myself into some microphone on some dumb game risking waking them up?
Dgar Yes I voice chat most nights, I have two teenage children, I'm not some basement dweller.
I don't have your experience, however we have rules about using platoon chat for matters pertaining to the game only. E.g. spotted an incoming convoy sw of xxx.
Now I have had problems with egotistical assholes leading raids, years a go when I played wow. But that was on text not voice.
Shaky I am sure there are plenty of good uses of voice chat, and those were just my personal reasons for not using it not really important to the larger topic. And my experiences are with large voice chat servers, meaning 100's of people in a guild or an entire game server (we had this on Mag server WvW in GW2 so a couple hundred people on sometimes). My main complaint is still that it causes habits of people to no longer type or read chat, thus leaving out 90% of the people on your server, guild, whatever. I have seen many good warnings, ideas, players go unused/noticed because they didn't say it on a microphone. And seen many 'newbs' not knowing what to do because they are not on the voice server. That would be a fault of how people choose to use the medium.
On another note the reason my wife does not use voice chat, is that she has a so called 'sexy' voice and has gotten undue attention, stalking, harassment in games, or not taken seriously or treated like a glass doll because she is a women. Just another side to the voice chat issue. Think of how women are treated on it sometimes. Again its a problem of the people not the medium, but the medium enables it.
Like I said personally I can type and read just as fast or faster then voice so it may just be me and some of the people I know. The few instances it could be useful 'hey behind you, large force' it appeared that no one listened or knew what they were talking about and got wiped anyways. Really good teams, can function with very little chatter, they work together just on each others moves and anticipation (aka they already know what they are doing). Everything that can be done in voice can be done in chat. Which is a more effect means of communicating in a game, at this point I still think chat is more universal and inclusive thus the winner. I would rather have slightly slower communication and include more people.
From my experience, if people don't want to write, they don't, and if they want to write, they do. Voice chat has nothing to do with it, except that it adds another layer of communication that one can use in anyway that seems fit. Especially as it is so fast, it allows communication way more then when only typing.
Also, you know someone is answering as soon as he starts talking, you do not have to wait until the sentence is fully formulated and send, which sometimes only feels long, and sometimes really takes a while.
Of course not everyone will be with you in a channel when playing with random people, but as stated above, i do not see people suddenly losing their ability to type just because they talk.
Imho it often enhances the typing, as you can quickly ask your friends what they think if you don't know the answer while typing. While you may not be able to fully decide what the party will do next when half the people are not in a channel with you, you can at least ask the half that is in a channel with you and therefore half the amount of people that still have to decide - saving quite some time.
And if you as a warrior don't know which skill the healer in your party should skill next? No problem, your friend who is your main healer on raids may be playing some boring old single player game, but he's here with you in the channel. You ask him, within 10 seconds you can give a more detailed answer then if you had goggled "MyMMO healer guide" for an hour.
Voice chat should be optional, both by game design and from the players expectations, but i don't think I've ever met people i would want to play with, but not talk to while playing, therefore i can say voice chat greatly enhances my multiplayer gaming. I do not use it while playing single player games with lots of voice over, especially cut scenes.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
I usually don't use voice chat except when I'm doing a dungeon with my wife or our friends. Occasionally, a guild-mate will call on Skype to just chat while we both do our own things at whatever in the games we play. I'm a guy and all my toons are female, so voice chat really throws some people unless I've told them up front what I am IRL (as if it really matters in the game.) Our standard joke is that MMORPG stands for Many Men Online Role Playing Girls. In a game my wife plays, one of the friends with a female toon had the oddest squeaky little voice, we were pretty sure they sounded like they might be a midget in real life. Then one day, he came into Vent and didn't realize for several minutes that his voice altering software wasn't enabled! LOL! He was mortified, but we all said, "no problem" and "don't sweat it" until he felt better and now we don't have to listen to that really odd squeaky voice anymore. Heck, it's ROLE PLAY people. Or, as in many cases, people like me who just like to watch the cuter female toons!
p.s. - my wife and I each have our computers set up in separate rooms so that whatever racket is going on in one room doesn't bother the other. We use Skype or Vent for the intercom sometimes.
Comments
You have to hold a key to talk.
They hold the key down. They aren't bright.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
I found voice chat something that was hard to live without when raiding in WoW. Being able to call out stuff instantly over voice chat was so much more efficient than trying to type it out.
I'm going to be playing FF14: ARR and based on what I've seen of the battle it seems to be too fast paced to be able to efficiently play your class and type out things in between abilities. The guild I'm currently in are all old school FF11 people that never really used voice chat since you were auto-attacking over half of the time in that game, so they never felt a need to use it. I wonder if that mindset will change or not in the endgame content for FF14 if it requires a moment's notice to be able to react and call out things.
You're an example of someone who makes up facts to prove what he already believes. If you had ever actually done "serious" raiding..as in a group trying to do hard mode content ect you'd never even attempt to make the argument you've just made.
Good raid guilds don't have these meniacal raid leaders who need their ego padded constantly, or who throw tantrums all the time. That comes from people trying to perpetuate a stereotype so they can keep using it as an excuse.
Voice coms are required in raid guilds because no one wants to type out a short story before and after each attempt. It's very easy to miss a typed msg in the heat of combat. It's pretty hard for a good raider to zone out and miss a voice communication.
I don't do voice for several reasons beyond the whole clique examples above:
1) I play games for an escape from the constant "chat" in my rl, silence is golden.
2) It really does break immersion for me when I hear someone talking about their rl car troubles,etc. while we're off to slay dragons or whatever.
3) I don't care if someone is 100 playing a wee hobbit or 10 playing a mighty wizard, as long as I don't have to know.
4) Then there's the whole gender issue, "omg you're a rl girl, wanna cyber, send me pics" type of crap.
This is the most important reason to have a non-voice server in a popular game. All of the deaf players would flock to that server and yes there are quite a few people who are hearing impaired or deaf out there.
There are many legitimate reasons for refusing to use voice and raids CAN be done without voice. Problem is that the non-voice people are split among all of the servers and forced to comply or play at best on the low social level.
I would figure on a game with at least 12 servers, the non-voice server would end up the most populated server.
Nice idea, but it might be hard to get it to be fast and accurate
Hey man, I'm sorry that we've had different experiences, but I've been in quite a few guilds in the past 12 years or so I've been playing MMO's, that have had bitchy, whiny raid leaders in voice chat. Just because you haven't experienced much of it doesn't mean it's not a regular occurrence.
At the same time, I'd be hypocritical to assume all guild/raid leaders are the same, so I understand where you're coming from. I suppose I've just had worse luck.
I've played in big raids enough to know that voice won't make you a superstar in your class.
The good players I've seen know what to do without ever having to be told. The not so good players? Well, they either have to tell others what they need or be told what they should do through chat or voice.
Mastering a raid is knowing how to read the action on the screen as it's taking place. Who says people have to communicate at all to get things done? Now I've been on raids, and one thing I can tell you is that people who know what to do just do it automatically, without having to be told by anyone.
Tankers tank the ones they ought, without having to be told. Healers heal the ones they ought, without having to be told. DPS throws DPS at the mobs they ought, without having to be told. And this is all done automatically, without anyone having to say word one or type word one.
And the good players adapt and change strategy, without having to be told, because they see the dynamics of the battle and change. They "flow like water" to use Bruce Lee's term.
You get an even better sense of this when you get a spontaneous GM event. There you get big pick up groups of all kinds, and they tend to self-organize better than any central organizer ever could. If a big, unrelated mob can self-coordinate like that, perhaps we underestimate the ability of people to play their classes in a team without having to be told what to do.
My group monitor and the visuals communicate a group better than the group members themselves. When you have people who know how to play, you don't have to type or to talk. You just look at your monitors and just do.
All the information a player needs to know is on the player's screen. The screen knows the status of the group better than the group members themselves. Because the heart of these games are still--even after all this time--responding to visual cues on the monitor. MMO combat has little to nothing to do with communication...unless you count the status bars as communication.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I dont know if you've voice chatted much but most times I have its a constant barrage of bs conversation that you basically have to respond to or be deemed impolite. So that push to talk is on more often then it needs to be. Its like the guy at the bus stop that wont stop talking to you. There is also often times to tell things that are longer then a few words, such as planning a large scale attack, hence background noise or such gets included (music, tv, talking, doing dishes, etc.) We are not all single men sitting in a basement, that can yammer on all day with strangers about nonsense. So every time I need to 'talk' on some stupid game I need to turn off my music/tv tell my wife to shut up, or kids, or dog, turn off the any noisy appliance and then say a few choice words? And I do hear this all the time in the background of other people using voice chat btw. Audio of their personal life, and you know what I am talking about so don't play dumb. Or on the flip side, what about times when quiet is needed, like a sleeping baby or wife, should I be there talking to myself into some microphone on some dumb game risking waking them up?
Yes I voice chat most nights, I have two teenage children, I'm not some basement dweller.
I don't have your experience, however we have rules about using platoon chat for matters pertaining to the game only. E.g. spotted an incoming convoy sw of xxx.
Now I have had problems with egotistical assholes leading raids, years a go when I played wow. But that was on text not voice.
Don't Blame the medium, blame the message.
Shaky I am sure there are plenty of good uses of voice chat, and those were just my personal reasons for not using it not really important to the larger topic. And my experiences are with large voice chat servers, meaning 100's of people in a guild or an entire game server (we had this on Mag server WvW in GW2 so a couple hundred people on sometimes). My main complaint is still that it causes habits of people to no longer type or read chat, thus leaving out 90% of the people on your server, guild, whatever. I have seen many good warnings, ideas, players go unused/noticed because they didn't say it on a microphone. And seen many 'newbs' not knowing what to do because they are not on the voice server. That would be a fault of how people choose to use the medium.
On another note the reason my wife does not use voice chat, is that she has a so called 'sexy' voice and has gotten undue attention, stalking, harassment in games, or not taken seriously or treated like a glass doll because she is a women. Just another side to the voice chat issue. Think of how women are treated on it sometimes. Again its a problem of the people not the medium, but the medium enables it.
Like I said personally I can type and read just as fast or faster then voice so it may just be me and some of the people I know. The few instances it could be useful 'hey behind you, large force' it appeared that no one listened or knew what they were talking about and got wiped anyways. Really good teams, can function with very little chatter, they work together just on each others moves and anticipation (aka they already know what they are doing). Everything that can be done in voice can be done in chat. Which is a more effect means of communicating in a game, at this point I still think chat is more universal and inclusive thus the winner. I would rather have slightly slower communication and include more people.
From my experience, if people don't want to write, they don't, and if they want to write, they do. Voice chat has nothing to do with it, except that it adds another layer of communication that one can use in anyway that seems fit. Especially as it is so fast, it allows communication way more then when only typing.
Also, you know someone is answering as soon as he starts talking, you do not have to wait until the sentence is fully formulated and send, which sometimes only feels long, and sometimes really takes a while.
Of course not everyone will be with you in a channel when playing with random people, but as stated above, i do not see people suddenly losing their ability to type just because they talk.
Imho it often enhances the typing, as you can quickly ask your friends what they think if you don't know the answer while typing. While you may not be able to fully decide what the party will do next when half the people are not in a channel with you, you can at least ask the half that is in a channel with you and therefore half the amount of people that still have to decide - saving quite some time.
And if you as a warrior don't know which skill the healer in your party should skill next? No problem, your friend who is your main healer on raids may be playing some boring old single player game, but he's here with you in the channel. You ask him, within 10 seconds you can give a more detailed answer then if you had goggled "MyMMO healer guide" for an hour.
Voice chat should be optional, both by game design and from the players expectations, but i don't think I've ever met people i would want to play with, but not talk to while playing, therefore i can say voice chat greatly enhances my multiplayer gaming. I do not use it while playing single player games with lots of voice over, especially cut scenes.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
In a game my wife plays, one of the friends with a female toon had the oddest squeaky little voice, we were pretty sure they sounded like they might be a midget in real life. Then one day, he came into Vent and didn't realize for several minutes that his voice altering software wasn't enabled! LOL! He was mortified, but we all said, "no problem" and "don't sweat it" until he felt better and now we don't have to listen to that really odd squeaky voice anymore. Heck, it's ROLE PLAY people. Or, as in many cases, people like me who just like to watch the cuter female toons!