So I gave voice chat a try

[Don]

Since apparently no high end PvP anything would do without voice chat so I joined up one. I'm enlightened by hearing stuff like "KILL THIS GUY" and "NEED HEALS" because that totally tells me who to focus on in the middle of chaos. I typed out 'inc 1 snow' and apparently that got missed along all the "NEED HEALS" in voice that was more important than an attack that could've cost us the game. I've seen PUG that have far better coordinations without saying anything at all than these super awesome voice chat enhanced guys, but apparently that's required. Look, I can understand there's obviously some value at the very high level but if you're using voice chat to say "KILL THIS GUY" that's not really very high level at all. It seems like people use voice chat just because they like to talk, which is totally fine with me, but I don't like to talk (I prefer to type) and I don't need to hear about people talking about things slightly less useful than Barrens chat during my experience.

Sometimes I think I'm reading a chapter straight out of manga, like without being enabled by the power of voice you're only limited to 10 or 50% of your true potential, because once you are able to coordinate a masterful plan like "KILL THIS GUY", how can 'this guy' possibly live? And if you say "NEED HEALS", surely everyone's going to heal you up immediately and you'd never die. Surely nobody would've noticed that your lifebar was dropping very fast otherwise.

On an unrelated note, I was solo defending somewhere, and I typed out '2 enemy incoming'. No help came and I died, and later I asked how come no one came to help, and the rest of the team said you should've asked for help if you needed them, because I was totally supposed to win 1on2.

[Julius Seeker]

That pretty much sums it up.

Playing Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, we only ever use the voice chat for casual chatting - as we all know each other from work. The only time we ever use it for gameplay stuff is when one of us hasn't fought a certain Monster type, and is fairly new to to the game. If you know what you're doing, all useful info that informs your decisions is on the HUD. Although we have a few weird strategies that we do such as stunning or trapping, placing a lot of large bombs around his head, and then detonating them; someone who doesn't know us may not know what's going on and could easily get killed.

But it is fun to chat online, occasionally it is game related, but it's more like "Why don't we try *insert crazy strategy*"

[Anarky]

I played 40 man Molten Core runs on Ventrillo with no problems, but this was a group of people I had played with for quite some time and people knew when to talk and what their roles were.

I use voice chat daily playing with friends and can't imagine going back to typing things out.

[Don]

There's nothing worth saying over gameplay itself. You can do Molten Core while completely cut off from all forms of communication just fine. The medium of communication doesn't really matter anyway. People who don't get something won't get it just because you're telling them over voice as opposed to typing it. People who gets it usually gets it either way.

Now if you like to chat with people while playing that's fine but that has nothing to do with the gameplay whatsoever.

[SineSwiper]

Yeah, LOTRO had it on by default, so it was pretty much a requirement for playing. Most people knew what the fuck they were doing, but then again LOTRO wasn't populated by a bunch of 14-year-olds, either. It helps when you're not playing the AOL of MMOs.

[Don]

I never bothered much with LOTRO so I can't say much about the gameplay and its necessity on voice. I can say that certain type of gameplay does encourage voice chat. For example, WoW's PvP does encourage voice chat because you're dealing with 15-40 people trying to attack/defend 5-10 objectives. You'll constantly have to put all the information you have available in the various objectives to form a cohesive plan. That is, if someone say '4 inc to stables, it's not so much that saying this is faster than typing, but that at the same time you should really be asking the guys in/near blacksmith, farm, lumber mill, and mine what's the current status due to the scope of the game. Voice chat is rarely needed in PvE unless you're playing one of few absolutely crucial roles. I saw an interview about how people did Hard mode Soa and they had a chat channel dedicated to the guys popping the lightning balls, back when the lightning balls are tauntable. So let me get this straight, you got these 2 guys who need to pop a very visible lightning ball that inflicts massive damage to anyone who touches it, and you need that guy saying, "Hey healer, just so you know lightning hurts ow ow ow heal me OMG!!!"

This weekend I was running a raid and the guys in chat are like saying this boss periodically there's going to be this ghost that shows up and choke your tank and causing a loss of aggro, so you got to kill the ghost to free the tank. Predictably this was called out in voice chat, even though the guy calling this out was very late. I was already halfway done kililng the said ghost because it's actually very easy to see a ghost doing a force choke animation, but the rest of the guys apparently need to be told on voice to kill the ghost that's choking your tank until they heard it on voice chat.

[SineSwiper]

This weekend I was running a raid and the guys in chat are like saying this boss periodically there's going to be this ghost that shows up and choke your tank and causing a loss of aggro, so you got to kill the ghost to free the tank. Predictably this was called out in voice chat, even though the guy calling this out was very late. I was already halfway done kililng the said ghost because it's actually very easy to see a ghost doing a force choke animation, but the rest of the guys apparently need to be told on voice to kill the ghost that's choking your tank until they heard it on voice chat.

Not everybody is playing a role that would have you staring at your enemy, or maybe be trying to get to a better position or whatever. But, yeah, the whole point of voice chat is to point out that sort of thing early.

[Don]

This weekend I was running a raid and the guys in chat are like saying this boss periodically there's going to be this ghost that shows up and choke your tank and causing a loss of aggro, so you got to kill the ghost to free the tank. Predictably this was called out in voice chat, even though the guy calling this out was very late. I was already halfway done kililng the said ghost because it's actually very easy to see a ghost doing a force choke animation, but the rest of the guys apparently need to be told on voice to kill the ghost that's choking your tank until they heard it on voice chat.

Not everybody is playing a role that would have you staring at your enemy, or maybe be trying to get to a better position or whatever. But, yeah, the whole point of voice chat is to point out that sort of thing early.

The modern MMORPG doesn't really do much in terms of forcing to know about stuff you cannot possibly see (i.e. several screens away) that must be relayed by another person in PvE. The vast majority of the encounters, if there's something you need to know about, you can see it on your screen. In the encounters where you have to split up into some number of subunits, you're often way too far away to do anything for the other subunits so you might as well they did everything right, because if they did not you can't help them anyway. It doesn't hurt if someone's pointing this stuff out, but you're supposed to be watching it too.

[Shellie]

In LOTRO theres a specific raid I recall that required some people to be in 2 separate areas and then the main fight was going on in the main area. It required good communication to accomplish. LOTRO has built in voice chat. No need to share vent server info. Once you join a group including raid groups, you have a combined voice chat.

I miss that game heh

[Don]

In LOTRO theres a specific raid I recall that required some people to be in 2 separate areas and then the main fight was going on in the main area. It required good communication to accomplish. LOTRO has built in voice chat. No need to share vent server info. Once you join a group including raid groups, you have a combined voice chat.

I miss that game heh

The prototypical 'voice chat' fight would be like the EQ1 Jelvan, where you have to fight 3 bosses of uneven difficulty that basically have to have identical health % at all times. The fights last long enough (at least 10 minutes, can be a lot longer) that you can start seeing if group A is going to fall behind and it is crucial to figure out if group B or group C can spare another healer to help out quickly. That said you need the fight itself to be slow enough so that there's actually time to call for help whether it's in chat or in text. In today's MMORPG where the difficulty seems to stem 100% from enrage timers, it's pretty much like "X died here, we're doomed because we won't make enrage timer now". There's no point to tell the rest of the party this information because you're still doomed. If you don't understand the encounter sure you can bark out all sorts of orders but basically all challenging encounters of the WoW generation is designed such that the enrage timer can never be met if anybody died except at perhaps the last 10% or so of the boss's health. So there's nothing to tell your raid because any mistake just means game over, unless it's an encounter that was trivial to your raid.

I think the problem, from a difficulty point of view, is that if you design an encounter such that it is possible for the 'cavalry' to respond on time, then sufficiently good players can always respond on time and render the difficulty irrelevent. For whatever reason, the post WoW era raids shun the fact that your cavalry can cover for the rest of the weak players. I don't think that's the right design, but this design makes most communication irrelevent. It's like the Matrix when the Agent said 'your men are already dead'. If there's any bad news to report, that's precisely what's happening, so there's nothing to report. It's either A-okay or all dead.

[SineSwiper]

Yeah, there's some stuff in LOTRO that I couldn't imagine even working right without voice communication, especially in Mines of Moria.