When Wren and I were looking for a new guild in EQII, we ruled out any that had voice chat listed as "mandatory".

I have a love-hate relationship with voice chat.

It's useful and it's intrusive.

It's cool tech and it's often buggy.

It can be really, really hard to give out instructions to players in a group or raid when one has to type. It's the old "LOOK OUT BEHI—oh, never mind," scenario. Voice chat offers immediacy that has its strongest application in raids, where a second or two can mean the difference between someone noticing ADDs, and everyone staring at the ceiling in a pool of their own blood.

I am all for voice on raids, as long as only the raid leaders, and possibly group leaders, are actually voiced. The rest of us should just shut up and listen. If you don't like a loot roll or have to go take care of some biological function, you can TYPE that. I am very fond of the word "squelch", and think it should be applied more often.

I don't like to break immersion, as dorky as that sounds. I can pull off a reasonable Dwarf voice myself (especially if I have beer on hand), but when my friend Charles plays his girly gnome and talks like the sasquatch he really is, it just feels wrong. He's not the greatest svelte female dark elf, either. At least the people on voice chat with Chas won't be hitting on him... as much.

Push to talk is your friend. USE IT, people. It encourages you to talk only when you have something useful to say. It is not hard to use. Remember, it's STILL faster than typing.

I do not need to hear your mic on all the time. Really.

I do not want to hear you eating pizza (with audible enthusiasm), blowing your nose, slurping your soda, your phone ringing, your conversation with your mother, clearing your throat four times to get rid of the clingy bits of your triple cheeseburger, and I sure as heck don't want to hear what you have on TV.

I do not want to hear you rambling on about your latest shopping trip, a description of the car wash you went to on the way home from work, details about the ingrown hair in your nose, or the list of your highest DPS scores and recounting of last night's episode of South Park. If the mic is on all the time, I know people who will never... stop... talking... because they seem to be afraid that silence will eat them alive.

I am a big fan of companionable silence. I can hear the game music then, too, or sing along to i-Tunes.

I hate messing with controls and options and stuff every time I log on. I really do not like having to alt tab to fix settings, and I don't like having to keep track of arcane addresses for chat servers. Yeah, I'm lazy.

No matter what, there are always one or two people who can never get the settings right. You hear squeaks, pops, screeching banshee noises, and somewhere, under all of that is the guy asking for a rez. Really quietly under all the noise, like he's a thousand miles away. Well, okay, he IS, but that is beside the point.

Having said all this, if you're going to have voice chat, make sure you do it right. I like integrated in-game voice. If you're going to have it, may as well make it simple. I have not tried the WoW version of game chat yet, but Turbine did pretty well with the version they added to Lord of the Rings Online.

The best voice chat I've experienced so far is that done by a company called Vivox. They provide voice for EVE Online and Second Life. Widely disparate games. We can argue about the steaming pile of moneymaking crap that is SL another time, and in the meantime you can read how Coyote is also creeped out by that "game" (note that his column is rarely fully work or child safe, so you should wisely hesitate before clicking).

The point is, Vivox provided two very different worlds with a very different set of customized options.

For EVE, they have set up lots of different channels. Imagine being able to talk to other officers in real time, having private chat, guild, group and raid channels that you can switch back and forth between right on the main chat screen. Yeah. Even a Luddite like me can appreciate that goodness.

For Second Life, Vivox provides area-of-effect communications. You can speak directly to one or two or several people, but you can also hear people within a specified range, if you wish. The sound here is also positional (you can tell if the speaker is behind you, to the left, etc), and attenuated (they sound more distant when they move away).

In both cases, the sound quality was better than anything else I'd heard online, even though we were on live, populated servers.

Something else Vivox has that I really had fun with are voice filters. At GenCon, I got to try some of these out. I could sound like a gutteral Orc, or a silly Fae. This is the voice filter that Charles needs. A full grown man can sound just like a female Gnome... or a female Elf. Of course, he'll have to deal with all the punks hitting on him again, but maybe he likes that sort of thing. The Paladin filter was great too... it adds in some depth and a touch of reverb, so you actually sound... heroic. I cannot convey how cool this feature is!

EverQuest II is our main game here, so I asked Senior Producer Scott Hartsman if they'd have in-game voice any time soon. He responded, "With the number of Vent and Teamspeak servers out there, I don't think that us doing it is a priority."

He made the point that products like Vent and TS are used even when people are not actually in a game at the time. True. He did say that he'd love to see EQII hosting Ventrilo servers, "and possibly integrate it with the launcher." But noted that it was outside of his call.

Overall I dislike voice chat, but if it was easy to use, entirely controlled in-game and had cool, fun features... then maybe I'd get to like it. I will have to sic the Vivox people on the big honchos at SoE. I am sure they'll see the amusement value of the voice filters, at least!

;-)#
Brasse

You can yap about your freedom of speech here.

I can always squelch you, hehe.