Voice Chat, good or bad move ?

so voice chat is nearly amongst us, for me i look forward to it as it will make life easier
when helping peopel out describeing how to do things etc and will save me from buying
so many keyboards where i wear the backspace button out lol.


it's a bit of a taboo subject that isnt talked about much but it is a fact that many
and i stress MANY females in SL are RL guys, hence why they all have girls and not men as partners and have in their profiles " sorry guys only interested in women " or " striclty lesbian " they are total give aways, now i'm not saying all females are guys in SL but many many many are.

presumably guys see females having SL partners so make up female alts to get girls with but are they ? maybe they are both guys thinking they are both girls ? and hows voice chat going to effect this as there can only be so many lesbians in SL with broken microphones.


now i'm not against guys playing girls, i dont myself and i'm okay with the ones thats do thats fine i just think that voice chat is going to put the lid on it for some.


what say you ?

I dunno... I was just in beta and got sexually harassed via voice by a hick and some foreign dudes... it gives me the creeps, I don't want to hear every Tom, Dick and Harry

yes thats very true i hope there will be some kind of mute feature for individuals as last thing i want is to have to listen to music being played all the time

You know, I have to admit I am kinda curious to hear what some of my good SL friends' voices actually sound like.

Although I'm sure that if those voices turn out to be men's emanating from women's avies (or vice versa) it would sure take some getting used to ...

This is going to be a really big sea change ...

A lot of women will have suffer through the "so, let's hear if you're real or not" initially, precisely because of the frequency of cross-gender.

Partners/friends of either sex will initially be subject to a certain amount of distrust if they don't readily join in with voice.

Griefing and harassment will be up, especially in the first few days/weeks but will diminish as the novelty wears off and people find places where they can voice in peace.

I haven't been to the beta grid recently, so I'm not sure if voice is still camera-based. If so, there's a whole lot less privacy because plenty of people won't realize anyone can just listen in.

A larger split on the language barrier because people simply won't be able to keep up, and because most native speakers don't have the required patience to make sense of mispronounced words, or the time it will take for the other to voice their thoughts in a different language.

After a few months noone will think twice about voice, and those who don't participate will have left as their numbers dwindle.

Some businesses, particularly fashion, will notice a significant reduction in sales since those who do gender-hop will no longer be in world to consume their creations, and a lot of those who currently earned money in the adult business and are female will spend less because they're not ready to make the jump from RP'ing to phone sex worker.

And what honestly bothers me the most is that those who are truly deaf or have a speech problem, will be lumped in "yeah right, I've heard that excuse before" category and won't be believed.

Yes, I'm pessimistic .

I think that voice changing software will rapidly destroy the "verify by voice" hopes many think will be the result of voice.

Right now people play a silly game of trying to figure out if someone is RL female or not by their look or what they like to do in SL, or any other sterotypical things.

When voice comes there will be a new - hey do you think her voice sounds funny? - added into the mix.

Paronia over women's RL gender will remain. After a time it will be back to where it is now.

The funiest part about it though - of course if people are using outdated stereotypes from MMOs in a place like Second Life. There are a lot more women playing this game than the paranoid think.

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Now then Sensual's comments are more important. Muting someone AFTER they have sexually harrased you is far from a optimal situation.

And how the heck will they enforce Mature guidelines on Voice chat. Including this new Age verification plan.

There will be no record of whats said that the Lindens can scan through.

It's horrid. I ended up turning my speakers back off (that's how they usually are on the main grid) and the world went silent. Why? Because everyone was talking.

Was kind of peaceful though.

I guess people running around using the F word in every sentence, calling one another faggots and yelling BOOBIES every five minutes is attractive to some, but I think I'll stay in my nice quiet muted world.

very good point
would liek to hear LL's viewpoint on voice and age verification,
maybe voice chat will only be availible to registered users ?

Gotta see how it's mplemented.

If it's optional, if it's got a mute button, fine.

Voice services like TeamSpeak or Ventrilo, which are widely used in World of Warcraft and other group games, have options for creating multiple channels, to avoid voice clutter, and for private channels, to gain privacy. If SL's version has that, fine also.

If it's badly implemented, probably a lot of people will not use it (including she-male escorts who will seize on any good excuse to avoid it).

I think it's a good thing - but only if optional.

well i wont be using it mainly beause i keep tripping over the cord to the headphones because i am always getting up and sitting down and running around due to real life in the background and I get tired of paying 50 bucks a week for a new set. Also if its unmutable since it will come through my speakers I guess my speakers will be off so as not to drive everyone else nuts around me ..

heh its just one of those SL features I simply wont be using much if at all just like the ability to watch movies so no biggy really. I'm pretty sure though it will be "turn offable" its not logical to just feed it into the rest of the noise since you can stream music and movies and background noise etc if its not turnoffable how can you listen to music withouth constant chatting in the background?

hehe. That's the nice thing about excuses. When you are looking for one, they are *all* good.

In any case, I tried it out on Beta for curiosity, but I have no intention of ever using it. Nobody wants to hear my dorky-ass voice anyways.


.

you have the option to mute people .

I think the Age Verification requirement will put more escorts out of business than voice will.

"My bandwidth is metered". All the excuse I need, thank you.

I tried the Beta for the first time last night and to my surprise really liked it. There were some very funny people there and their voices were just great..someone had a smokey southern drawl and someone else was a great joke and story teller. I didn't realize how much I had missed hearing people's voices!

And I have to admit that the two people who reacted instantly negatively to the idea of voice when I mentioned inworld that it was coming did make me wonder why. (They put sound on their parcels so they aren't deaf). They both said voices would make things "too close" which would make sense if their Avs were fantasy but they had also previously made a big deal of having their Avs look as much like thier RL selfs as possible! So it could be an issue when you run into someone who just won't use voice and it leaves people wondering why.

This will come to the rescue of all gender benders / tourists. So the voice test will become meaningless. I might even give it a try to make my voice sound a bit more draconic.

Just a reminder everyone, details about voice implementation can be found here:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/27/bringing-voice-to-second-life/
and
http://secondlife.com/community/bhear.php

These resources explain how:

Voice chat is opt-in. You will not have to turn off your speakers to disable voice chat -- you can disable only voice while enjoying other sounds by going to your preferences.

Individual users can be muted. You can simply right-click an avatar and choose "Mute" from the pie menu to mute offending avatars as you always have. More fine-grained muting is in the works, including muting only voice but not text.

Land owners can opt-out of chat on their parcel. Don't want chat on your parcel? You can turn it off!

There's a lot of good info in these places, and I hope everyone will read about HOW voice chat is implemented before jumping to conclusions.

With all due respect ... i dont see that as a bad thing

The voice thing is weird .... i come from a gaming background, First person shooters , The games kind of needed voice to be able to work as a teqam in team based games , the advantage of voice realy helped your team to win , Communicating possision's of enemy player's , forming plans for attacking defending ... voice was pricless to me as a FPS gamer .

But for me here in SL .... i realy don't think i will ever use it . I went to the beta grid ( i recomend you all go and try it too ) and found myself standing with a group , all talking and having fun... happy little group , But you could cut the atmosphere with a knife at times .

I was happy to type chat ... others ( most of them liked the sound of ther onw voice imo ) happy to use the voice .... strange thing was .... the amout who was using both ..


I think for the people who want it ...it will be the best thing to happen for them in SL ... But the people like myself who are not realy bothered ... the impact will be nothing more that turning it off in prefrences .

will be interesting to see how many females end up sounding like darth vader lol

Enough will sound questionable enough that people will give up on voice proof of gender - thats what I was saying.

some of the questionables will be RL women.

some who dont sound questionable at all will be RL men.

Sorry folk - no one's listening to you (get it??!! lol) - we are all on about age verification.

I also wanted to mention that way back in the day before JIRA (erm, ok, only a few months ago), there was a feature tool that let people suggest new features. What was one of the things people clambered for? You guessed it -- Integrated voice in SL! A lot of people are under the idea that this is something that LL is pushing on us un-requested, but indeed it is something users have asked for in the past.

As for me, I love using voice. It's been lots of fun when I've tried it on the beta grid, and I've had similar experiences as Dnali posted above. I love the accents! (Mine's southern-US too, but not smokey at all.)

I imagine there are times when I won't want to use voice at all -- like at dance parties and such. Then again, I haven't been to a party on the beta grid yet. But I do like text chat, and there are some truly gifted text-chatters out there. Some make my face hurt from laughing at their textual double-entendres, and I'll miss that if it goes away.

Over all, I think its gonna be a great addition to SL.

LOL! WHen I was in a group, talking away on the Voice Beta, someone thought I was using a voice changer. Guess my voice does sound odd.

iv'e been told i have a really strong english accent so not sure where i fall in to that list
but most people in the US cant understand me properly when i'm on skype.

if voice chat works out well i might get a decent headset that will probly help as my mic is
really old.

Well I didnt say its bad either. Just that I think it will happen.
Age verification will reduce the number of sex workers. Many who are Unverified now.

So will voice probably - Especially if voice becomes commonplace for either the sex or the "sale"


But the Age Verification will also reduce the number of customers for Escort Services.

The combination will have more of an effect on that biz probably then the Casino AD ban has on casinos.

Im sure that Escorts will still be around though - just less widespread.

Thats a really big sweeping change in a hurry.