YES or NO - Should LL add this voice chat?

You are in SL, correct? Then you are a nerd, you fucking twit.

lol

If you don't know, there are already SL escorts doing voice/cam and they charge a lot more than the other ones.

The only thing that is gonna change (if it will change) is that rather than using an external software those escorts would use SL integrated voice. Maybe... Will we able to do private voice sessions?

Imagine you happen to be near a "private" place, would you like to hear things like "Mhhhhh ohhhhhh yessss give it to me!"?? Maybe not all the time

Edit: oh and there are several club owners that will hire men playing as women, if they can "be real".

Sadly that won't be the case. Stereo sound, through speakers or a headset, doesn't work like real sound. Stereo fools the brain by using a sound level difference between the speakers, whereas in real life your brain also uses phase differences between the sound at each ear. What this means is that however "spatialised" the sound is, in stereo you don't have enough information to separate out different voices.

So, in RL, if you're in a room with 50 people talking, it's not too hard to distinguish a conversation with one or two nearby individuals. In stereo its impossible. That's why movie / TV dialogue has to be so unnatural.

I voted no as well. But then again, we are STILL waiting on things that were supposed to be in the works a year or more ago. Any longtimers remember speedtree, or havoc 2.0?

We might see it by 2010

I vote yes because it will bring SL closer to the 3D equal of the Net and will be very useful or even indispensable for entertainment, art, group readings, peotry, group meetings and conferences, politics, and general social and commercial use.

SL is not a game or a place that was primarily designed as an escape from first life, neither is it totally healthy to have a complete separation of your SL and RL existence.

However I recognise it is going to create griefing problems, which will get resolved albeit with a learning curve.

Finally as thing stand it is going to be available and enabled Sim by Sim although individual landowners on the mainland can opt out by disabling speech on their plots, fair enough, that gives choice. And on the mainland it is free.

However it is really going to create a problem for all owners of private islands/estates that are class 4 servers and below because as things stand the island owners will be required to upgrade to class 5 servers to get it, and by implication other future SL improvements. That will mean a one off upgrade cost of $1,650 per sim and an increase in island tier cost of $100 per month. That is big money if you own a group of islands that you rent out in sections.

Looking at the poll there are going to be either a large minority or small majority of users wanting these additional services, therefore that is the core of the second problem, that is some individual island renters/parcel avatars may have to pay extra for something they do not want (speech) or would not usually use, albeit for potential future data improvements in the SL service. And some will want it, a difficult issue

I accept that island living is generally better than mainland providing you have an acceptable and fair island owner, however I also believe LL should support the island owners desire to enhance the SL experience for avatars by not charging for additional services that eat into their (per unit) modest profit margins and make them uncompetitive vis-à-vis mainland

Regards

John

Personally I do not want people polluting airwaves with their chat, I feel this is ridiculous because currently they (LL) cant handle the bandwith when we have 30,000 people logged in. So with adding chat the S: experience and all else will suffer more than we are aready.

Secondly many people here cant handle the cross over to RL voice there are alot of defective people here. All I see is being witness to chat fights and drama to a scale that will be mind boggling. *Groans* all the women fighting forget it I cant see the benefits.

Third if they want to get cash they should charge all free accounts again to generate the money and leave land owners alone. I will not invest one cent in this enhancement and have no intention to now or in the future. This only place I feel this us useful is for meetings and events where you have people acting as an MC other than that go to Skype and keep it out of SL. I have three (3) islands and pay enough for this client that much of the time is problematic and I am tired of all this nickle and diming for half baked enhancements. I Say lets make it work rather than add enhancements to a much labored infrastructure

I voted no to adding voice to SL, but it isn't going to make any difference. It's being done whether we like it or not.

An go live in Soviet Russia if you dun like it here! An get off mah lawn!

Mari

It seems pretty obvious from the way the poll is running that 70% of mainland landowners will disable the voice feature and my guess is that only a tiny fraction of class 4 island owners will be willing to front an upgrade to a newer server for the feature. I know I certainly won't be, LL would have to offer something considerably more impressive and worth an extra $100 a month. So, in the end most of us may get our wish: voice will be enabled in some places and disabled in most.

Im actually aware of this. However their prices do not seem to be more than text only escorts for the text only portion of their services. This is probably due to competition. Im pretty sure those escorts who will voice chat (not the opt outs) will be the ones in demand, and of course text-based cyber sex will be on the decline. These women we are speaking of, of course, charge quite a bit more for voice service.

Right now its a buyers market theres more escorts than you can <pardon the horrible pun> shake a stick at. Ill bet this becomes a seller's market where those voice cyber prostitutes will charge what the market will bear. Im guessing the only text based escorts that will stay will be the very cheap.

While I quiped I like my sex cheap. This was mainly a joke. I dont see a reduction in the escort business as a terrible thing. But It is going to remove a lot of any role play appeal for the women and their clients that enjoy that portion of it. What well be left with will be a step much closer to phone sex lines with a scattering of cam services.

I will say if prices of naughty adult fun go up too much, the Real World Strip club will become more apealing to many.



I figure that 2 avatars far enough removed from anyone else are having private voice chat, reguardless. Much as is done with text chat now.



This would mostly be a possitive thing. Of course the sound of a woman faking an orgasm isnt nearly as erotic as the sound of an actual orgasm, so it might be over-rated. Though I expect many less discerning types wont care.



As I mentioned I would find this hugely ironic. If through voice tricks it will be easy for RL men to fake being women and use voice chat. Meenwhile many RL women cant get private microphone time, or simply dont choose to.

If the use of voice changers does become common, The same suspicion will set in. People will try to figure out if they can tell. The will spend so much time trying to 'hear a fake' they will be at the same place they are now with text. A subtle push will move towards integrated webcam for business <cough> reasons.

I voted no (much good *that* will do, of course) on the grounds that: 1. voice "IMs" are already enabled using something like Skype, hence there is no pressing need, and 2. as various posters have already said, the voice system may make the already wonky SL grid even more subject to lag. (I know, I know -- LL said that it wouldn't )

As far as non-voice-enabled SLers being subject to suspicion from those who are voice-enabled -- I am sure that we would, in the best of all possible worlds, be able to come to grips with these evolutions and changes in technology. Of course, no one is forced to "live" in SL the way we must in the real world, and I do fear that those who might feel temporarily unwelcome would simply choose to leave. Anything that drives away the kind of creative, interesting people who are the backbone of SL would not be good for the Second Life community at large.

I doubt it will work out that way though. People in the forums I think are more text based than the average user. Part of the reason they like forums.

We also are expossed to how its going to affect people we know from the forums so were more aware of the reasons for objections.

But in the real SL? I think it will have a lot of popularity people will be very much for it in most place right off.

Hopefully like with movies this novelty wears off and people relaize its not that great after all.

LOL

NO. It would create more lagg to the servers. I think there are more important issues that LL should take care first.

While I'm still iffy about generalized voice chat, my support for person-to-person voice in SL has grown. Last night I got curious what the experience is like so I bought a headset mic; it was so much fun using that to talk while I was using my hands for other things like panning the camera around.

As for being able to use Skype, while that's true, it would be so much nicer to be able to just click on a button in your Friends list just like with text IMing.

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As long as it won't be a real speaker-based, echo canceled-audioconference («Without a headset and mic the sound quality will not make voice communication an enjoyable experience for you or your friends» -- Joe Linden) it is a definitive NO. Audio is an important part in my immersive experience and I don't want to break it with headphones.

Not that I generally have that much faith in SLH, but this seems slightly off at best:

I'd rather know what he actually said rather than the paraphrased version, but pro or contra, I really don't think LL should be funnelling money that's paid to maintain and keep the grid up, to a third-party company, to introduce a feature that is essentially available for free through other means.

(On a separate note, it'll be fun to see how they manage to make voice town halls work. It will be a total disaster noise-wise unless there is some kind of moderation system, or they'll have to stick with Skype in favour of their own feature)

/me thinks voice is +90% driven by business customers who want to be able to talk while they're in their corporate sim. This is fine with me - if LL can milk The Man to get lots of cash to hire more people and stay in business, more power to 'em.

Personally, I have zero interest in voice chat that works perfectly. That number drops a lot if it does bad things to the grid or they don't make it very easy to filter spammy kids out.

hehe I think that translates to you haveing LESS THAN ZERO interest =).

To be honest -
If I was single , I think my interest *might* be higher than it is now.

- but then again Id just use skype, like I did apache in the old days (lol 10L prize to people who remember that program)

Still I hate the concept of Linden sanctioned discrimation by the "you should voice" set. I dont mean the Voice prop ponents who will truley be "to each their own", I mean the near strangers who are going to voice request people and then be nasty when the answer is no.

If doing this screws up the grid, that would be far less than zero..

Some enterprising person will need to create a response gesture with voice and text that provides the canned response "sorry, you are an idiot and it's bad enough that I have to read your text, let alone listen to your live voice."

I voted yes, but I have a problem with my computer configuration that results in the microphone input being permanently disabled. I'd have to dig up up a USB mic on ebay to use voice in SL.

/sarcasm on

Voice chat is a great idea. Especially the way it will be implemented - the whole mainland automatically sound-enabled, every free and unverified account holder able to use it.

Phone sex meets cyber sex! Be a 3D Adonis and listen to sexy female moaning, hell, every last male on the planet will sign up now. No problem, the grid can easily take another 2 million users. Save telephone costs - have your mom at the other end of the continent sign up for SL and chat for free! Save the costs for a Teamspeak or Ventrilo server - have your whole WoW guild run SL in the background! I'm sure no one else in the shopping mall will mind your raid chatter; you can even stay on a camping chair the whole time and earn some L$ for a voice hooker.

Of course, since voice isn't added on a per-account-basis, we have to brandmark the deaf-mute oldfashioned typers instead of marking the illiterate voice chatters. Those who opt not to use the new standard will get a tag of sorts, a virtual David's star armband, something to show the rest of the world: doesn't belong to us, an outsider, a virtual retard, we'll have to use the oldfashioned keyboard and type very slowly to be understood. And of course she's a gay male, a pervert, why else wouldn't she want to use voice chat.

What about all the europeans, asians and the other non-native english speakers? Well, we never really wanted them here in the first place. There are goons out there who used to translate everything with babelfish and paste it into the chat, can you believe that? Hehe, those times are over. Either try to smatter in your funny accent or get the f*ck outta here.

/sarcasm off

If I can RP a female escort for 4 months without being picked then what is the problem, customers keep coming back. If I was gay or a crossdresser I'd be using a male AV wouldn't I. You are having an encounter with my Female AV, and if anything I suspect the knowledge of what really turns males on is a bonus that some women lack. The few times I've been asked the question were by people straight off the bat, who I didn't want to deal with anyway, so I tell them the truth. Female friends don't ask the question, so I don't either, because I take their AV's as I see them, maybe my 99% immersion makes me a bit of a fruit loop I suppose because I'm definately hetro in RL and the moneys good too, seeing theere aren't any traditional male jobs in SL, like farming, truck driver, courier etc. My AV doesn't string guys/girls along into relationships, she has to push them away if anything which makes me worry a little I'm too good at this if anything. It could be awkward I guess if I discovered I had random Lesbian sex with another guy from work

I'm really worried that my R2D2 AV's voice will give away the fact I'm not a real droid, and hence no longer gender neutral, even if I can translate into Binary.
And when I start talking over voice like Kenny McKormic (South Park) there's going to be problems

Yes. I believe that is the plan.

I voted no.

coco