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General: Can We Talk... Again?
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
MMORPG.com's Isabelle Parsley discusses gaming communication (voice chat included!) in this week's Player Perspectives.
A few months back I wrote about voice chat and my unwillingness to adopt it as my primary means of MMO communication. Things have changed, and even a comparative dinosaur like me can be brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century; and while we’re talking about staying up to date, there are a few things on the social and communication side I wish all MMOs would implement. Most games have some of these elements nowadays, but I have yet to see an MMO that incorporates all the social components that would make my life as a gamer easier.
Read more of Isabelle Parsley's Player Perspectives: Can We Talk... Again?
Comments
Fell asleep at paragraph 7 =(
"Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day!"
This Kirk picture again...serious?
IM just the opposite, i want less interaction with the real world when im playing. I dont want to know who is on what game, where they are at, what they are doing, I can call them If i need to know that and we can coordinate something. we got our own teamspeak server for our friends so we can communicate Ill jump on there if need be but when im playing I want to be left alone by everyone so I can enjoy the game, not be bothered with real life people. thats just me though and none of these additions would really bother me either as long as I can be the invisible man when I want to be.
Ingame chat should be a requirement(not an option) in every MMO. Elimination of typing as the only way of communicating inside your game world is crucial the more games become a social escape and a greater challenge to players.
Vent/TS etc is useful in certain situations, but the setup is daunting to some and doesn't allow you to expand your friends list or guild membership very easily. Forget about pick up groups as well with external chat programs.
Lotro's ingame voice chat makes it easy to run pugs/raids/quests with anyone in your immediate group and this makes your gaming experience go so much smoother and helps everyone reap the rewards of playing the game.
Total MMOs played: 274|Enjoyed: 9. >:|
I was the same at one point, as I wrote here earlier. However, there are useful practical reasons for voice chat (coordination in dungeons is a lot easier, for example), and I've discovered that with the right people, it's great fun. Note that I still type-chat a great deal, but I am slowly rethinking my original loathing of voice chat.
It's not needed for standard everyday chat in a guild. It is however very usefull for harder group content or raid type content. Where quick reaction and adaption to situations is required, voice chat wins. Anything else, typing is perfectly fine.
I am glad William Shatner doesn't frequent this site. The things his dad says wouldn't compare...
There is a tiime and place for voice chats such as raids and such, but as a everyday thing I vote no. I don't want to be blasted by idle chat and certainly don't want to hear children cussing while I play.
Or . . . everyone could stop acting like teenage girls and resist the urge to text, check facebook, and tweet every 5 seconds. Why do you need to be on facebook while you are playing? If you actually have the time to communicate outside the game, alt tab out. Otherwise, you are defeating the purpose of the game itself. If the game is not enough to hold your attention, then you shouldn't be playing in the first place. Is this what we want for the future? Games where 3/4 of the people are busy instant messaging or checking facebook in the middle of a raid/pvp encounter/etc.? These tools should only be championed by the kiddies, and aren't they already doing this during class anyway?
The more social features you add to an RPG the less immersive it becomes and I already have facebook.
While its great to keep in touch with your friends while gaming, it wouldn't work for me cause most of mine use facebook, smartphones, and consoles to play their games. *shrugs
I still like playing MuDs from time to time. Cause nothing ignites my imagination like discriptive words. But i have a fetish for multicolored scrolling text.
"I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
- John Galt
Voice chat is almost required for many games if you are attempting to some of the group related content. Take Eve for example. Try coordinating a fleet with hundreds of people while recieving constant intel and coordinating with other fleets of hundreds of people. It is not possible. The same can obviously said for raiding in WoW. Maybe after you have a raid on farm you can do it without vent/ts, but it's easier no matter what with voice chat.
Not everyone needs to talk or have a mic. However, if you are playing a PC game you probably have some form of speakers/headphones that allow you to listen. As far as breaking immersion, what MMO's do you play for immersion really? They are social games, meant to be played socially. Even the biggest loner needs to intereact with others in the game world at some point
If you want immersion, go play a single player game with some headphones on.
I am not big user of voice chat really. I do realize that it is a very useful tool for playing MMO's though. I do like that many games have some form of integrated voice chat, but I can't agree that all games should have high-quality in-game voice chat. A limited form works fine. We have Vent, Teamspeak, Mumble, etc already that all work great. These are dedicated voice chat clients. Having devs spend money and time on integrating something as useful as Teamspeak into a game seems kind of pointless to me. Would rather have them spend time on content and fixes.
welcome to the internet and online gaming...omg you work in a communication and media, medium and you were resisting using voip? and they say I am unqualified to work in this field? I am progressive enough to embrace change.
I wholeheartedly agree.. I hate voicechat as it dampens immersion. That said I'm not toop hot with all the fast paced twitch based moves nowadays but can still type through em.
+1, It can definitely be useful in group centered activities when fast communication can be the difference between success and failure. I refuse to use it otherwise, though. There are too many people out there (sorry guildies, I lurve ya but it's true) that just can't shut up once they are on vent- be it about mundane, trivial crap (think twitter but spoken) or people that want to share their awful tastes in music. I just can't do it.
Probably the same reason i prefer texting and e-mail to talking on the phone.
Sigh,
First off there is a sizable and growing population of people with hearing loss of one kind or another. Making this sort of thing manditory would out them from gaming.
Second there is the explorer archetype of players. Many of these like to be in role and hear the sounds of the game. Until you can get to the point where all voice is converted to in-period and in-character, this group of people will not go for voice. All it takes is one teenager crackly voice playing the barbarian, or a male voice playing the female toon, or the screaming baby in the background to remove one from the world.
Third there are the people who do not participate in the whole facebook thing and like to be more anonymous in the interweb. These also do not tend to go for voice.
Fourth there are people who play in areas where you have to be able to listen to something else or can't have sound active.
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What galls me most is how the non-voice people have been marginalized and made harmless. It has gotten to the point where in a lot of games you can't even find a group or sometimes a guild if you do not go for the whole voice thing.
Non-voice people are a sizable minority of the population who get ground under the game like role-players are in games without roleplaying servers.
That said -- there really NEEDS to be non-voice servers in games. A place for people who do not want to be forced into voice or can't, can play the game in peace.
I play MMOs to escape real life for a few hours each day. Nothing breaks the immersion and jars me back to reality faster than hearing the big tough warrior tanking for our group sounding like a 13 year old girl IRL, or that cute rogue you've been chatting with sounding like Billy Bob Thorton IRL. It breaks the immersion and cheapens the experience for me. Also, I don't want to be forced to listen to a bunch of immature jackasses spewing bile and profanity all over. Bottom line for me: when people tell me that voice chatting is a necessity, I say "no thanks" and go find something else to do. I really don't think I am missing out on anything.
Really? I mean, really? You just spent countless paragraphs talking about voice chat. What was the point? Ventrilo. /End thread.
The point was not that ventrilo doesn't fit the function. It was that ventrilo is not an all encompassing solution for every communication need. Vent is great for games which you need to have fixed access, but it is not where you want to have open access. Plus, she wasn't only referring to voice comms.
And I agree with her. I want to have a voice client which I can use in any game I play and invite whom I please at the push of a button (for either them or me) or a short command.
cell phone texts and computer voice chat....
literacy is dead.
My problem with voice chat is that it eliminates my ability to decide how immersed into the game I want to be. I've found voice chat eliminates any pretense that we might be our chars in the game and makes crystal clear we are all people sitting at keyboards somewhere.
Literacy is dead for other reasons, starting at the grade school level and with parents, not because of anything else. Teachers allowing papers to be turned in and still graded well with improper wording is that reason and parents allowing their children to text them like that is the second. My children will spell out every word properly when texting me, I assure you of that and their literacy will be at least at the college level at minimum regardless of their career choice.
As for little kids on the other end I can only recall one instance and that was some guys kid in the guild and there was no language. There are many reasons to love or hate it. I think it lies within each guild themselves. I also think it gives you a certain way of deciding whether or not you will be leaving that guild. Its a great way to see personality that you don't see in typing. To me a guild is like a family and I've been in a number of them, but consider myself part of two different guilds. One for my PVE gaming and one for my PVP gaming. Each are different, but the playerbase mentality is roughly the same, relaxed and easy going with a bit of "I wanna be the best" attitude I can be without being overally full of themselves.
Some games I like RPing it and it will never have a place in voip. Its place belongs in chat. Fortunately I only RP lizard type characters and those games having those are few and far between(Looking at you Bioware on probably why I'm not buying your game...)
That picture... what has been seen, cannot be unseen
Give me liberty or give me lasers