So voice chat was rolled out on the remaining US realms Monday… huzzah, right? Well, how about the good, the bad, and the ugly?
The Good:
We had somewhere between 6 and 9 people in a guild chat (why no default Guild channel??) last night. The first thing I did was check stats: I was standing in the Iron Forge Auction House at about 8pm Server Time (CDT). My FPS was around 100, my latency was under 100–no problems at all. Most of my guildies reported the same thing. Also a very good thing was that it worked, no fuss, no muss. A few people had to be talked through the setup, but once they figured out where the voice tab was, things were great.
One guildie is running a pretty minimal system–512MB of RAM–and reported no additional lag due to voice chat. This is a Very Good Thing. (It’s also to be expected, given the voice chat servers are completely separate hardware from the realm servers–very wise decision on Blizzard’s part.)
I use a USB headset, which means I get voice chat (whether Blizzard’s, or Skype, our usual voice client) in my headphones, and game sounds and music through my speakers. So the fadeout of game sounds when you are talking or hearing voice chat doesn’t affect me a lot, but I can see it’s a definite boon for those using analog headsets, or (Elune forbid!) speakers for voice chat (can you say “Echo…echo…echo…”?).
The Bad:
While the new controls are good as far as they go, they are still lacking. The Chat tab is on the Social Panel (default keybinding “O”). You can also bind keys to the Guild and Friends tabs on the Social Panel. Good luck binding a key to Chat.
While the new Voice tab is okay, and right-clicking a channel to turn on Voice for that channel is good, how do you turn it off? Well, you can either leave the channel (but what if you want to continue text-chat in that channel?) or you can completely disable voice chat. Umm…how about a right-click to disable voice in the channel? You know…a toggle?
Push-to-talk (PTT) as default behavior is bad, mmkay? This is the 21st Century, people. Except for programs such as Ventrilo and TeamSpeak, PTT was replaced by voice-operated-control (VOX) in the early second half of the 20th Century. (That’s why any decent headset or voice program comes with a “mute” control.) (And yes, I recognize this may be a personal bias, but then, I’ve been operating radios in one form or another since 1974. I always envied my fighter pilot buddies for their VOX helmet mics; we used telephone handsets with a PTT button–I guess so Top Secret stuff wasn’t accidentally transmitted to the Bad Guys.) 
EDIT 10/3: Duh…should have made this point more clearly initially. Why can’t the Guild chat channel have a voice complement? Seems kinda silly to have to make a channel (and then have to password protect it) just to have a giant guild chatfest.
The Ugly:
The sound quality. How can I say this delicately? Okay…I mentioned normally we use Skype. Skype is usually CD-quality sound; at worst, it’s FM-quality. High fidelity, nearly lossless. And that’s with anywhere from 2 to 9 people on the same conversation (which means, unfortunately, it’s out for raiding–but we don’t raid–yet). It’s been about a year since I last used Ventrilo, but as I recall, the sound quality was somewhere between AM and FM quality–and was highly dependent on the computer system of the operator. Or so it seemed.
Blizzard’s voice chat, as one of my guildmates put it, sounds like we’re talking through a tin can. It’s tinny, very high in the treble range (one guildmate who is an alto sounded like a mezzo-soprano), and scratchy. PTT makes it worse (although I think the sensitivity control might help with the initial clipping). In a word, the sound quality sucks.
It also seemed to me (although I didn’t do a poll among the guild to confirm this) that higher-end headsets (mics, especially) improved the sound quality considerably.
The Summary:
For a first effort, I’m generally impressed. For guilds that can’t afford a Vent or TS server (give me a break: $100/year split among 10 or more people??) it’s a good alternative. But if you don’t need more than 9 people on voice chat at a time, my recommendation is Skype, even if it is a memory hog. However, I’m hopeful that voice chat is still a work in progress, and that Blizzard will fix the little things in the interface that bug me, as well as continue to work on voice quality.
What are your reactions to this new capability? What did I miss?
I couldn’t get voice chat working for me on my system– I could hear others though (although they couldn’t hear me) and I thought that the quality was decent, if a bit hit-and-miss, but certainly not up there with Skype, which is what I usually use as well.
I’m going to keep playing with the settings and stuff though, because I want to try it out!
Hey man, don’t be knocking us poor students who are poor and can’t afford ventrilo services
. JUST KIDDING! Actually, the problem for me wasn’t about the money. It was the method of payment. Years ago, I didn’t have a credit card or a paypal account to subscribe for ventrilo hosting. Can you imagine the kind of argument I had to make to my parents to borrow THEIR credit card to pay for a service that they thought was useless and risk it online? Yeah, it didn’t happen. Thank god for Paypal.
I know you’ve said that it doesn’t impact performance, but I’m still not going to enable it or try it out. We already have a vent server. There would be little reason for us to switch to WoW ingame. Furthermore, Vent allows us to stay connected with players in the game while we don’t have the client running. It frees us up to do other things while remaining on standby in case another player needs to jump in.
I know, I know, you’re not knocking vent or TS (which I think is bad) or Skype, but I just think it’s a useless feature for Guilds who already have established servers in place. I suppose it could be useful for the Guilds who don’t have the means to pay for one though.
Couldn’t agree with you more, Matt, and I should have made that point more strongly: There is NO NEED to use Blizzard’s voice chat if you have a suitable alternative, even one that isn’t free.
While I don’t want to turn this into a Skype love-fest (there are plenty of good/bad/ugly things there as well), it does fill a niche between WoW Chat and Vent/TS.
I think it was a good idea to put it in game for PUGS. it will make things alot easier in them from now on.
I hardly ever pug (’cause I’s shy) and me guild has TS, but I got friends who pug a lot and I know they’d like to have better communications in the dungeons, so I hopes Blizzard fixes the bads and uglies you identified.
And no Kestrel, you’s not THAT boring. We’s just THAT lazy about commenting.
I haven’t tried out the in game voice chat yet, as I haven’t really needed to. I don’t get on Vent to chat, just to listen, as I’m one of those damn non-verbal types, who types all responses to spoken questions.
HowEVer, I used to be a raid leader (I do talk, sometimes, under proper circumstances, if all the stars are aligned) and I have to say I’m a huge proponent of push to talk, as in the middle of a raid we had a young teenager with voice activation on who was caught in a bit of a… private moment… and it was a good 10 minutes before I stop blushing enough to continue with MC.
@Ratshag: LOL! Touché.
@TJ: Thanks for stopping by. And yes…you do make a good point for PTT, and I think in a PUG I’d probably lean that way myself. However, my mantra is “Friends don’t let friends PUG.”
I’ve use both TS and Vent, and for our guild, the WoW voice system may be the best. Two of our members live in Africa, and on the Vent channel there is a lot of noise. There was no noise on the WoW voice channel…WOOOT for us! Also, Vent > TS any day of the week as far as my experience has been.
Ahh…good observation there, Daxenos. Makes me wonder exactly how Blizz does that. But it’s encouraging that there are some definite cases where WoW Voice Chat is viable for more than just pugs.
PTT is the only way to go. My group has tried Voice Activated and what I end up hearing is random conversations between players and the people they live with, TV shows, parents yelling at kids, and everyone hearing my wife yell at me about why we don’t have milk in the fridge. PTT is priceless, I mute those who don’t use it (I don’t mute people in raid)
Blizzards implementation of voice chat has left me uninterested. Sure I tried it out. No one could hear me, then a friend told me to put my mic input to its highest everywhere. So I did, 300% input gain and I sounded like a whisper. I’m sure there are more setting I need to configure to get it to sound better but my guild has a vent server so I am not too worried. If they get rid of the vent server then I’ll worry about making it usable.
The other problem with voice chat. Me and 3 close friends rerolled and are leveling up again. We always need 1 more DPS for a group. We can 4 man stuff but it’s quicker with 5. The last thing I want to hear is some random rogue who is constantly talking about his weapons and screaming out what crits he gets and his DPS and so on. I think everyone knows what I’m talking about and if you don’t then youre probably that person whether you’re a rogue or not. (Usually it’s a rogue, but it doesn’t have to be). Its easier for me to say “Sorry I couldn’t get voice chat to work”.
Necroleanan – Mage
Calandris – Priest
The ventrilo payer in my guild and me decided that we’re gonna keep using vent. We’re so in love with DJ’ing for each other and anyone else who cares that we have a permanent radio channel set up on our vent server.
Best tanking song ever: Elton John – I’m Still Standing
Best Onyxia song: Dream Evil – Chasing the Dragon
Best song for parading up Valley of Heroes with Ony’s head afterwards: Dream Evil – Chosen Ones
Oh, that’s great stuff, Mana!!