Voice chat is here whether you like it or not
by Elizabeth Harper 
Oct 2nd 2007 at 10:36AM
Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that yesterday afternoon Blizzard rolled out their in-game voice chat system to a huge number of realms (183, by my count). And what this means to you is that, as of yesterday afternoon, you should have had access to voice chat. But I'm seeing reports on the functionality of voice chat that vary wildly. Some players think Blizzard made a mistake of epic proportions when they implemented the feature, and that it needs to be removed immediately. Some found the game unplayably laggy since its implementation. Others praise its quality. So now, I'm asking for your opinion on the current state of voice chat functionality -- how well did the roll-out go on your realm?Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
p3ngu11 Oct 2nd 2007 10:40AM
I haven't had lag this bad since they updated my realms instance server...(pre-naxx)
Brian Oct 2nd 2007 10:42AM
I think you need one more option in there of : "I was able to logon, but gameplay was horrible as was game mechanics, so I logged"
Arras Oct 2nd 2007 10:40AM
first shoulders, now voice chat...seriously, enough already, this junk is giving me migraines
just glancing at my realm's forum, most people are lukewarm about voice chat. Some report it's working great, others way it sounds like people are at the other end of a tunnel and underwater. Probably soemthing to do with the creative labs sound cards snafu.
I can't even listen to my in-game sounds anymore
Todd Oct 2nd 2007 10:45AM
I'm afraid none of those voting options relate to me. The world crashed a few times, but the game was hardly unplayable. Haven't experienced any lag. While I do use voice chat for raids, my guild owns their own Vent server. Got to broaden those voting options. :)
Slayblaze Oct 2nd 2007 10:52AM
Tried it out but went back to vent for last night's raid. No lag though.
Actually I was more impressed than I thought I would be with the new voice chat, especially since I'm running a Creative soundcard with Vista setup. From what you've heard lately that would be like the kiss of death the way some people bitch about it. But no issues at all here. No popping, skipping or lag. And Blizz's voice chat isn't half bad really. The way you can set different sound levels for all three options (Sound, Music, Ambience) during incoming/outgoint chat is quite nice and impossible to do with external chat programs like Vent or TS.
Have to play around with it a bit more... need to find where you can adjust other people's incoming "level" because everyone I heard was way to quiet and could barely be heard.
Jalann Oct 2nd 2007 10:56AM
I'll agree with Number 3. The game was unplayable all last week and voice chat was terrible. I'm hoping whatever they do in today's maintenance helps.
Ryan Oct 2nd 2007 10:56AM
I don't experience any lag but the new voice chat sounds horrible. Even if I turn the sound all the way up, people still sound too quiet not to mention it sounds like they are talking with the mike in their mouths. I spent 1 minute on it trying to tweak it and then promptly logged back into Ventrilo.
gundamxzero Oct 2nd 2007 11:00AM
We just still use vent
Steve_S Oct 2nd 2007 11:02AM
I must have missed it. Ran Bot last night and before I logged in the note just said there would be rolling restarts. I figured it would be on normal downtime on Tuesday.
Dewey Oct 2nd 2007 11:04AM
Only 5 members of my guild tried it last night. Out of those 5, 3 had to spend hours trying to get their mics to work. Mine worked from the start. I noticed two or three brief lag spikes, but nothing too serious. No server crashes (playing on Eitrigg). Sound quality wasn't too bad for us, comparable to Vent or Teamspeak, but you had to turn your mic volume up to at least 200% or people said you were too quiet. A so-so experience.
Nijle Oct 2nd 2007 11:06AM
I dont know about anyone else but Retaliation battle group had HUGE que times for arenas. It was up to 30 mins for 2v2 and 15 mins for 3v3 games.
Not sure if that's related to the Voice Chat bogging things down. Also the instance / BG servers keep crashing and such all night.
cap Oct 2nd 2007 11:11AM
How 'bout... I'm still on one of the crappy servers that didn't get voice chat yet?
Scadam Oct 2nd 2007 11:15AM
It seems ok to me. We still used Vent for our Kara raid, but I wouldn't expect that many people to accept change all at the same time. We did use it for our arena team and once one teammate bumped up his mic volume it was perfect. You can chat during load screens, but not when alt-tabbed out of wow. I think the wow chat is more sensitive to mic quality than anything - with my headset I was loud and clear, but guys with tabletop mics are way too quiet. If you don't have a proper mic, stick with the more forgiving apps like Vent.
Mal Oct 2nd 2007 11:19AM
I don't really care about voice chat either. I only play for my boyfriend. And I don't really feel that it was necessary for Blizzard to install this feature. Why when there are so many other means of voice chat available? Aside from having trouble with my p.o.s. microphone last night I didn't have many problems. Although, WOW did crash when I tried to "test" my microphone through blizzard's interface. After I rebooted, it worked fine.
Apocpwns (Skullcrusher-US) Oct 2nd 2007 11:20AM
I don't think I've ever experienced major problems in-game like this on such an epic scale before. From time to time, I normally have little stupid things happen that are out of the ordinary, but this was just very weird and frustrating.
I first noticed a problem when, right after enabling voice chat to try it out, a friend, one level 70, and another on a rogue alt in the mid-20's joined my party for some voice chat... apparently the software had become to buggy at that point that the level 26 rogue had miraculously reached level 70 in the past 5 seconds. Then I tried walking through the dark portal and disconnected.
Multiple attempts to log back in for the next 30 or so minutes proved fruitless. Guild mates begin calling my cell phone asking "wtf?!? what is going on???" complaining of serious strange issues, mobs and npc's disappearing, and so on and so forth.
When I finally got some kind of response for logging in, I was told half the time the world server was down. But then it would log back in and display my characters.
Then I clicked on my main to log in and I get told "there is already a player by that name" to which I reply no sh*t sherlock...
And then when I finally get back into the game, my screen spams "You are not in a guild" every half second for 20 minutes, every friend on my friends list apparently goes online and offline every second, even thoughin the guild listing they are on nonstop, but attempts to PST result in "not currently playing" messages.
Blizz: You clearly dropped the ball on this one and unrolled a new feature you weren't ready for. Take it back, and go back to the drawing board. Better yet, invest the money in a separate server for the voice chat feature. I know it would be very expensive to do that for every single one... but hey, I thought 9 million of us were paying $15 a month for this game, plus $20 for the game, and another $40 for burning crusade (for those who have it anyway).
That's at least $180,000,000 just off the purchase of the game. That's also $1,350,00,000 PER MONTH. If everyone who were playing buys burning crusade, that's another $360,000,000. I think blizz could probably afford dedicated servers and lines for our voice chat so we can PLAY THE F-ING GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE! Everyone I know just said "f it" and logged out last night. That's terrible for such an expensive game.
Shame on blizzard.
(My figures in US Dollars are based on an estimated 9 million subscribers worldwide that play WoW, as this is the last number I read about playing WoW, and I am too lazy to go look up and see if that number has changed)
P.S.-Sorry for the long comment I just extremely frustrated over the server problems last night, as did most people.
YPEELS40 Oct 2nd 2007 11:27AM
My server crashed a few times last night. Did test the voice chat.. Not as good quality as vent, but its free. Might use it for pugs where people are too dumb to get on vent. Didnt work when alt tabbed. And didnt have any lag issues.
It was funny hearing people talk in battlegrounds..
But not enough people were using it to make any good out of it. You can also mute people which is a plus.
So So feature, they could have spent their with better things.
Nathan Oct 2nd 2007 11:26AM
One of the things that the "voicechat=doom!" crowd overlooks is people like me.
I don't have a 70, nor am I even close (52 at the highest, 250ish if I didn't have an alt of every class). I'm not invited to these superleet guilds with raids and vent servers and working web sites and application processes to screen out morons. I trudge through 5-mans in PuGs, or at best the occasional blind-invite guild that is "small... but growing" (code for "Can u run me thru Deadmines plz lol").
According to the anti-voice chat group, I should have to suffer through breaking sheep, party leaders who can't use raid targeting, people who don't know what "pat" means, for 4-12 months until I claw my way to the max level, where I still won't be invited to a guild unless I'm willing to PuG over and over for my tier gear, rep, or whatever else I need. Unless I want to buy my own vent server and give out the information to strangers, or take on the hassle of forming, running and managing a guild while simultaneously trying to level.
In-game voice chat allows me to easily explain that I've got the healing situation under control. It makes it easy to ask "OK what's going on here?" in a new instance and have it explained without slowing down the entire group. It allows someone to say "sheeping the add" quickly so that I don't panic and slap SW:P on it.
In other words - it's the reason I'm NOT quitting the game.
Koskun Oct 2nd 2007 11:29AM
@15 - As far as I had read the voice chat is on a separate server. They didn't piggyback it on the game servers.
Also, your numbers are off as not everyone pays 15 a month.
Voice chat for me worked fine. People came through soft for the most part, till they realized, or someone told them where to look, that more volume levels are available outside of the game (Control Panel). Once they actually set their levels it came through fine.
Only thing I don't like about the voice chat is you can hear yourself speaking through your speakers.
Dan Oct 2nd 2007 11:58AM
There are features of this that are nice: the default view without overlays to show who is speaking, the inability of random people to just pop-in to your party or raid channel. Neither of those outweigh the fact that the compression is simply awful. Nor does it make up for the horrendous burden this put on the servers in terms of lag.
BigRedPimp Oct 2nd 2007 11:35AM
@15
Just FYI but the voice chat IS on a separate server. This had been noted by a blue poster, though I don't remember whom, before it was rolled out onto the live realms.