Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW

In theory at least. I mean you have to go out and buy attachments occasionally right?

=P

Bekah, I would be curious of your thoughts on what I wrote about my experiences with voice in WoW. The social realities I described would be only intensified in the climate of SL, so it seems to me perfectly valid to make the comparison.

Sometimes the Sex is FAR from wild........

people, who lives are that sad, that they have nothin better to do than to speculate if someone is male or female, because they may or may not have vchat enabled, are probably ones you don't need to deal with or will prolly ask within the first 5 minutes of vchat if you are wearin clothes or not.
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to vchat or not to vchat? its your choice. there are gonna be those who will say what they wish if you have it and some who will have somethign to say if you don't. my question is why is it anyone buisness who uses it or not? will it make your life easier if sally sue does have vchat? will you stop being friends with someone if they don't get it? are people really that shallow?

Hehe - Griefers - "we're local and we're vocal !!" *grin*

It won't be my world, my imagination any more.

Not that it ever was. I mean - my every action is controlled by some lazy puppeteer sitting at a computer. He decides what I wear, where I go, when I sleep. He is too prudish to even let me have sex - a basic human need.

Now you tell me he can even use my body to project his voice? If this goes on they will someday be able to project all of themselves into our world. Then they won't need us at all!

Think about it. WG

I'm trying not to......

Not really going to touch on the editing part because I prefer the more free form method of expression for day to day activities- and I don't use voice for roleplay. =)

There's a certain amount of pressure. There always is. I'm a girl who plays WoW. My guild has 8 other girls (about 20% of our population, which is very high for raiding guild truthfully). There are a few reasons why our guild attracts serious gaming girls and why it *keeps* them.

There's pressure to talk. But there's just as much pressure on our one Australian with a dead sexy voice (male) to talk as there is for the quieter girls. It get *boring* listening to the same people's voices all the time... and it's fun to chat about the little things while you play. Theorycrafting, babysitting, sisters, mothers- we cover a little bit of everything outside of raids, and it makes the game that much more enjoyable if you can hold a two sided conversation. Can you do it in text? Sure. But there are 3 real choices for chatting with your buddies. Guild chat- with the 25-60 other people is almost too broad a lot of the time. If your conversation gets too specific you wind up shutting out the majority of other people. Whispers- too confined. If you're just chatting while you're doing something else 3 or 4 or more people in the conversation keeps it moving and varied. Defined channels- are good if you have a specific question for the type of channel. Opening up ventrilo to hang out with your friends in vent allows people to choose if they're interested in talking (nothing worse than IMing to someone who's in a bad mood and just wants to kill things alone) and to chat in a very general group with several people.... but smaller than the full guild.

So it's a great medium for general chit-chat. People *like* to chitchat. Especially people who may use a MMO as their primary social outlet. Refusal to use vent or to talk if you have a mic becomes something of a rejection of the others in the channel. It's kinda creepy to have someone listening in on a conversation without ever throwing in a comment- so people encourage the quiet ones to talk.

But adults. ADULTS. know where to draw the line and where polite encouragement becomes harassment. Surrounding yourself with people who are capable of behaving nicely is a good idea for *anyone*. So in my guilds atmosphere the girls feel comfortable talking or not talking. Most choose to open up and talk after a few weeks and aside from the excitement of hearing a new voice (oh my god you sound just like I thought you would! Oh cool accent, where are you from?) it's all mellow. It helps if you've got an active female willing to brave the way and smack anyone who steps out of line- we have a few of those too. (Myself included. When we started the guild I was the only girl in a guild full of guys and I'll admit, it took some time for them to stop being excited to hear me talk. I was a *novelty* BECAUSE I spoke so rarely.)

Will there be idiots out there? People who are incapable of accepting that a girl won't talk to them? Sure. There are also guys who walk around with giant prim dicks and harass female avies about having sex with them. This is no different! You mute or orbit a guy like that in text and you mute a guy on vent who treats you with disrespect too. After a while most people are comfortable with how they've set their limits. You may know this, but not that. We can talk about this and not that. We can do this and not that. Voice is uncomfortable because people have to establish *new* limits and learn to deal with people who refuse to listen to reason or become rude.

It's all a part of being a girl in a medium that's dominated by men. Set your boundaries, learn them, love them, live them and don't associate with people who cannot respect them.

Eventually you'll find a group of people you feel comfortable with, and that is the group that you will game with. I game with my guild, and you couldn't pry me away form it. It's fun- the guys respect my limits and those who don't are re-educated or removed from the guild.

Limits, boundaries. It will take some work, but I don't see this being any better or worse than setting boundaries in text.

Bekah, I just wanted to reinforce your points because being neutral on this matter, you are able to accurately capture why voice in SL is a bad idea. Take this paragraph for instance...



Although you point out that Blizzard is coming out with voice because IT IS NECESSARY in order to strategize for raiding, you also point out that you wont use it because you already have Ventrilo. LL would do well to heed this advice. Particularly when given the fact that there are a host of voice programs that pro-voicers could use to satisfy their need to talk.

The point brought forward in your next paragraph is also a very good one and perhaps one of the better reasons why LL should abandon the implementation of voice...



That having been said, LL will never consider putting voice on the back burner.
Although in the minority population wise , the corporate and tekkie types have the capital and influence to push forth their agendas. Unfortunately, voice happens to be one of them and they are pushing it hard.

Don't stand for it Weston!! You stick up for yourself by going crosseyed, refusing to rez your textures and therefore being all grey and unappealing and occassionally randomly walking off the edge of the world for no apparent reason. I find that form of non-violent protest to be the best way of keeping those pesky keyboarders in order!

Oh im quite capable of understanding the distinction. It is voice that is spatialized, which those other programs are not.

It is literally the same difference as SL text chat is compared to a Old Fashioned Chat room.

As long as you are standing near the people you are talking to the "different situation" is not so different.



Actually those factors have been playing out in Second Life already. Just on a much smaller scale then they soon will be. The fact that you havent experienced it- does not, by definition; mean a damn thing.



Many have mentioned difficults that have directly occured in Second Life - both the beta and the main grid as reguards to voice chat.

The fact that the voice is integrated into the client and has spatialized effects - will not magicaly transform it into something that is not voice related chat.



This statement is internally contractory, you make a claim and then your explaination refers an entirely different situation.

In fact you refer to the attacked as attackers in the same sentence.

However there are anti-voicers who are being ridiculed , you did it earlier in this thread. In addition in other threads they are being accused of hiding things, being liars, Being anti Linden, etc.

So no, I dont feel its a silly argument.




Other than being included in the blanket "If you dont want to voice you must be hiding something."

In world there is some pressure against people who just dont feel like using voice. Ive seen it. Others have expressed it on these forums as well.

I for one am definitely hiding something: my voice.

And that's that.

No amount of pressure will convince me to use it in general world conditions - only on Skype or TeamSpeak with friends. I'm the first to admit that my accent, overwhich I have little control, will add little to any RP I am part of - being from Liverpool and all.

Your post was interesting -

However I dont have the same optimistic opinion of some "adults".

I don't like dealing with immature nuts.... whether they're 14 or 40. Perhaps I should have said people who have common courtesy- but it's considered an adult trait =)

If they don't have common courtesy and can't deal with people like an adult- they're not really the sort of people I want to be around *anyways*.

C'mon, Sweet Primrose,

A blind man can see you're trying to compare two things but you're making one out to be a true, heartwarming experience which is the typing version of your little drama scene and the other as being dumb and stupid which is the voice chat scene.

I guess some people can express themselves better typing while most do it using their voices. So, those who do it better in type, does this mean they carry or should carry typewriters around with them when trying to impress someone with sweet-nothings or maybe they rather pass on a note with their writings?

Telling someone, expressing your feelings with your voice is the way it's done, and not by passing hand written notes and sl is just like rl in most of it's aspects. There's no difference, even in voice you can express the mood, the scenery and everything else around you as well as what you're feeling at that moment just as you can do it in writing but it sounds a whole lot better then typing and doing it as most do, with typos.

But there is no need for voice for that. I play aside SL Everquest II as well.

Just yesterday evening we did a raid (Bloodskull Gully: A Noble Challenge). It was hard... very hard... Let it be known, that I hate orc archers!!!
But there was no need for voice. Everyone knowns their place and task of the class one is. And above all.... there was lots of roleplaying!

Morwen.

If the teams know their tasks and the people know how to play their class, there is no need voice. I do on regular base raids in Everquest II, we handle more then fine without voice (as we did the raids in Lineage II, after we dumped voice there).

Morwen.

I hated it to hear the male voice of our DE female guild leader.... It almost killed any RP. That is why we dumped voice again.

In Everquest II we have the fae... no voice of human, male or female, fits to that. Same can be said for orges, trolls or other races.

Morwen.

Nope - SL is very unlike RL in two important respects - one is the RP element, and the other is the fact that it throws together from people from all over the world, with wildly different linguistic abilities, who may be able to communicate OK in type, but would have difficulty understanding one another's voices.

The situation is analagous to that in China, where a Cantonese and Mandarin speaker can communicate very well in written Chinese, but not understand each other's speech.

Very true... I have already enough trouble to understand someone from the Northern provinces of The Netherlands (especially the one called "Friesland", not even to mention someone talking in English with some dialect.

Morwen.

Well in Wow I am a Druid and that is a complex class of which I am still learning about all the permutations. I can shape change into 5 different forms (six when I can be trained to fly) (have more or less ignored the restoration talent tree thus I cannot be a Tree of Life), and all of these skill sets suit different circumstances and environments. One example, fast land travel without a Mount, means I can get out of trouble fast but am very limited in my attack abilities, another is underwater combat as I can shape change into a water breathing creature thus surviving indefinitely but again am limited in fighting ability. Speech between Guild members may enable better co-operation

I agree the YouTube clip was amusing but if it was me I would have agreed code words and a strategy, (rather than F*** etc)

In SL the Sims I know best is the Caledon Group, it will be interesting to see what Desmond decides to do, that group might be a fair example of a good social network of people, with an element of role play, reasonably decent behaviour, and a degree of mutual trust. If voice works there then I think it is fair to say it may well work in other reasonable areas across the grid

Well, my main character in EQII is a monk (she is a cutie). One of the skills I have is to do extreme high damage for a small period. When I do this in a raid everyone should know this on forehand, so I created a macro that first emotes "*Calls upon the Ancient Powers of Sulek Ro*.... time to cast spell... effect of spell".
So everyone knows what will happen. In this case it is for the tanks very important to know, so they can increase hate/agression.
So co-operation can be done very well without voice as well.

And yes, it took time to work this all out. But it was worth it... and improves our roleplaying.

I also agree that during raids and hunts with voice the seems to have become acceptable to use rude language, which I am really not waiting for.

Morwen.

Am I the only one here who has never played this EverWorldof WarQuest thingie?

I don't wish to unduly male bash here, but many women here do wish to "hide" their real identity, and there are valid reasons (what some of you call "excuses". but whether it is due to Immaturity, Insensitivety, Ignorance, or Sexual Paranoia, no amount of convincing will change your minds. So when an invitation to voice chat is declined, just say Ok and move along.

what role will voice changing software play in all this do people think? if anyone doesn't want to broadcast their real voice couldn't they just disguise it by these means?

They can. I don't know how well these programs work though. If not too well, then the Paranoids would still think you were "Hiding" something.