YES or NO - Should LL add this voice chat?

I'd be more inclined to see your point if your profile wasn't so remarkably devoid of information, be it about your second life or your real life. It's almost as if you were hiding something.

Everyone is entitled to fill in what SL means to them, as long as you accept that everyone else is free to do the same. If that means being who you are in real life, that's a completely valid choice, if that means being someone or something entirely different, that's again, completely valid.

The meaning "It's almost as if (s)he is leading a second life" actually implies a behaviour that is quite different from how that person normally behaves.

I find it funny that so few people will speak their true motivation for wanting voice chat. They want to make sure the <lapdancer,excort,sex slave, hot club goer, or potential online wife> is really a woman. While you can request skype now integrated voice will give them even less wiggle room to avoid talking to you with voice.

This voice chat will probably do something none of us are expecting, It will drive the prices of sex services through the roof. Simply put all women who are men along with all women who cant/wont voice will no longer be able to work at the better sex clubs and escort services. Becuase those places wont hire them. They wont want to be thought to hire women who are faking it. Of course a lot of Sex businesses are run by men hoping to get cyber laid, so they wont want potential fakes working at their club.

There will probably be similair ripple effects in different areas. Gor for example. A sex slave who is voice enabled will be worth many times what a voice mute one will be.

On the more conventional side, It will be harder for men who are unable to see past this voice enabled business to get dates. The voice enabled Ladies will suddenly be in huge demand, becuase they help relieve our insecurities. So, to be realisitc they are going to cost more too. Everyone knows a girl friend costs more than a prostitute.

It will be hugely ironic if a good gender changing scheme comes along allowing those men who want to pose as women to do so unsuspected. Then we will beleive the fakers are really women, while many of the actual women who remain voice disabled will be assumed to be fakers.

Before anyone attacks me on this, I voted 'NO", I like my sex cheap(lol). Im simply voicing what I think a lot have been avoiding saying. I think Second Life is valuable for a lot more than sex, but we all know a huge part of Second Life. Just like First life, where all these urges come from in the first place.

An intrusion of privay? Or just a typical introductory conversation?




Well it's not just a question of whether somebody is male or female. It can also be a question of whether somebody is 14, 30 or 80 years old. These things do matter when trying to determine how to converse with somebody.


Oops. We're drifting way off topic and out to sea.

I didn't see a "Hellz No". LOL

So I just voted no. Are there not enough opportunities to AR individuals for harrassment and other verbal nuicances? Now giving voice allows them to just say whatever they want and probably without consequences. Will Linden Lab offer some type of Voice Logging as they have with chat logging? Will they respond to Voice AR's too? (Snicker)

Anything a griefer cannot type in chat will now be said in voice and then some. If this sort of thing is going to be implemented then why have Abuse Reports at all? Why have a TOS that gives anyone protection from others or gives consequences?

LL might as well just rewrite their TOS to protect only themselves, servers and all and leave us all to our own methods of dealing with griefers if they implement voice.

I say that they need to implement IP Banning before they do this.

do you ask for the phone number of everyone you meet online?

Hey, I resemble dat remark!

Mari

Ok, let me boil this down to two words as to why I oppose voice chat within the broad scheme of SL (leaving out educational or corporate needs.)

Cell phones.

Now that everyone and their Aunt Betty has a cell phone, it is pretty apparent that very few people actually have anything interesting to say and those that talk the most are the ones everyone wants to bludgeon.

Further, the one and only issue I probably agree with Elanthius about is the problems this creates for people who have a chat going, plus 4 IM's - no ability to scroll back in history and catch up with the conversation.

Yes the hypocracy on the part of LL is a bit hard to take. It is true though that voice was going to come to second life, someday.

It couldnt have been any harder to make it Opt in, though. Except maybe that they want it the default setting.

Still, Obviously they are pushing it ahead of their technology's natural development, since they arent even making Linden Voice, just using someone elses program and servers.

I'm hardly going to mislead somebody with a few forum posts.


Do I look really sexy in this forum?

Even though I, personally, won't use it, I think it is something that needs to be done.

However, teh dfault on mainland should be off. It should be integrated into the newer class 5 islands (as it is). I'm torn on whether or not mainland owners should be able to enable it, and whether they should have to pay an extra fee for it. paying would certainly help justify not giving the grandfathered island owners this service.

It needs to default to off because the potential for griefing is ridiculously high, and I doubt anyone has the hdd storage to hold that much audio to verify an AR, cheap as it is these days.

The real (for newspaper consumption) value for this option remains in town halls, community meetings, corporate teleconferencing, and the like. Of course it will affect the SL sex industry too, as others have noted. None of these need mainland to have it enabled by default.

I've got your number already, thanks.

x

The scheme is called nature: either sex has enough vocal range to lower or raise their pitch to that of the opposite sex (if on the fringe limits). Obviously not something anyone is going to think is worth bothering with, but it's definitely possible.

I'm not sure if I like your theory any better though and it kind of made me wonder about something else: I would really hope that sending a voice IM requires upfront consent on the receiving end (with the option to always grant it for friends). It's bad enough to walk through SL and be subjected to obscenities in IM (far from the norm, and I'm actually surprised of how infrequently it happens) without suddenly having to hear it and only able to mute after the fact.

what the heck is that supoosed to mean?

You know what? My voice actually does sound like it belongs with my avatar, but I'm not gonna use it. You may have already seen my rant in another post so I won't repeat it here. But I just had an experience in-world that make me think of it this way as well:

I welcome being mistrusted regarding my gender and hope that certain people do think I'm a man because I don't want to enable voice.

At least then the dumb sexist newb guys will stop treating me like I'm a mindless female and try to take advantage of me in real estate transactions by blowing smoke about stuff they know nothing about, not to mention they'll stop soliciting sex from me because I appear to be an attractive female but I won't use voice.

I voted no............as did about 71% of the others. But to be honest I couldn't care less, really. I won't use it for reasons personal........and I don't care how anyone takes that.

The reason for my no vote is really simple. LL has major problems with scaling, hardware, and piplelines. They also have a huge customer service problem. Everytime something fails or blows up we get the "please be patient" whine.........directly implying that they are swamped with work and doing their best to take care of it. So they go out and hire contractors to bring us this new and fabulous (oh, and innovative) service? What about those poor souls trapped in the server rooms? Doesn't Linden Labs think that maybe they should spend their money more wisely?

"Let's give 'em some glitter and glitz..........maybe they won't notice we can't do the important stuff"

Sorry...........not a good move at this time.

In other news, Screaming Bee LLC reports record sales...

www.screamingbee.com/

If it only works twice as well as video...

Too many Live Help conversations:This was the best collective wisdom at the time.

It isn't about useul features, it is about telling people "Hey, we have a place with real time streaming content, video, music, and voice. Any errors you encounter should be blamed on your ISP or you".

I voted yes. I believe this new feature will benefit some if not many people especially in business. I await its implementation and evolution. If it turns out to be a disaster, hopefully it will be removed. I have quite a few programs for altering my voice for fun in voice chatrooms. Most of them can convert a female voice into a man voice quite easily, but not the other way around. I have a free version of the Screaming Bee software, and it does seem to alter my manly voice into a seemingly realistic female voice. It is the free version, so it does not have the crystal clarity I would expect from the paid for version. It's definitely something to consider for the nervous cross dressers, lol.

I was looking for the "hell no" option.

I feel stupid talking to a computer screen, I don't want to get that personal, I prefer listening to music or tv in the background (and often it's my husband watching tv in the background, who I'm sure woudn't want to hear the inane banter going on in SL) and it's just not what I want.

I didnt want to give there any extra choices to confuse the results - hence the yes and no. I left the Pie option out too for this very reason.

I didnt expect certain observers of the poll results to be able to add up the yeses and nos and instead would decide the results were simply split on the issue.

It seems - rather consistantly so far, its 2 to 1 against amoung forum readers who decided it was worth voting on. Which is interesting.

I know, Collette. I voted no. Just sayin'

Well at first my reaction was, as long as I can mute it, I don't care. I might use it occasionally but for the most part, I don't want to hear yakking everywhere I go and I hate feeling chained to the computer by a headset. I do a lot of things when I'm in SL and there is background noise as well. I strongly prefer text, which I can re-read even if I miss it. And talking, and trying to follow a multi-person conversation is just tiresome, to me.

But when I read the blog, and the fears of those who think a schism may be created by this, and the concerns of those who, for many different reasons, such as being deaf or because they speak with a heavy accent or simply do not have a voice that in any way matches their avatar, do not want this. And it made me sad because for them this may be a big deal, indeed.

Edit:
K, wrong, it is going to be gridwide, heh. Nevermind...

So I voted no, not that it will make a bit of difference at this point, whatever happens.

i voted no because of a disturbing experience on DDO, dude was deaf, announced that, but since EVERYONE uses the in game voice system no one bothered to read that in the chat window

after getting everyone killed cause no one would take 2 seconds to type in what was going on there was massive anger, tons of cussing and even a death threat

i don't mind integrated voice, but it shouldn't be the main way of communication

besides i have fun enugh keeping up with 40 av's chatting in text, i can hardly wait for them all to be talking over eachother with no backlog / slider to keep up

OMG!. That's just horrific. People killed by voice chat! I imagine it gave you nightmares for years after.

Am I right?




It should be no different from being with 40 people in the real world. You can't hear everybody talking. Just the people infront of you.

It's not so bad really.

You nerds could always go back to IRC or MUD when voice comes to SL.