Thoughts on VOIP/In-game chat in AoC

If this was to be a feature then I think it will be quite interesting to hear what people say to you in the open world as it has been said that this game is going to be open PVP, I think it will have a huge affect on the the community for many things such as trading and for competitive PVP. But it could be a bad idea as look at the game "Rust" (Yes I am quoting this game as I'm quite new to MMO's and not seen any others with this feature), this could lead to a bad affect and a toxic community, hopefully it doesn't turn out like that but it could be a good feature for the RPG side of things as the game is economy based, so you can talk your deals and talk to your customers which can have a good affect on the players thoughts on the game as this will be making the game more personal if a feature was implemented.

Thanks for reading this :smiley:

Comments

  • Thanks for posting this :) I'd like the option for in-game voice chat. It would be great if this has positional sound. It would really add to my immersion in the game to hear voices from across the town square and to hear twigs breaking in the forest as you rush to get to your freehold at dusk! And yes I hear you about the immature voice chat that goes on in games like Rust and PUBG. Hopefully the Ashes player base will be better behaved, but yes the /ignore option should disable someone's voice communication also!
  • lexmax said:
    Thanks for posting this :) I'd like the option for in-game voice chat. It would be great if this has positional sound. It would really add to my immersion in the game to hear voices from across the town square and to hear twigs breaking in the forest as you rush to get to your freehold at dusk! And yes I hear you about the immature voice chat that goes on in games like Rust and PUBG. Hopefully the Ashes player base will be better behaved, but yes the /ignore option should disable someone's voice communication also!
    Yep, being a customer at the shops and trying to get the best deal, that would be nice to hear as I said the game will feel more personal which can make a game really good if it works out well.
  • I think it's pretty strange because it's not something I've ever seen in an mmorpg before, so I'm curious to see how as a community we will behave with such a feature. I hope it adds immersion and a new layer of fun in terms of roleplaying, and I hope we are all mature enough to keep the toxic and rude behaviour at bay ^^

    In short I am curious xD
  • Diura said:
    I think it's pretty strange because it's not something I've ever seen in an mmorpg before, so I'm curious to see how as a community we will behave with such a feature. I hope it adds immersion and a new layer of fun in terms of roleplaying, and I hope we are all mature enough to keep the toxic and rude behaviour at bay ^^

    In short I am curious xD
    We'll see, I just thought it will be different for a MMORPG and how it can be useful for some aspects but others not so much, but I think it will be a great idea :smile:
  • Interesting.  As with most things, options are a good thing.  I have no problem if something like this could be implemented and it not hurt performance of the game.  
  • lexmax said:
    hear twigs breaking in the forest as you rush to get to your freehold at dusk!
    Spoken like a true Elf......................
  • VOIP is a basic requirement of virtually every guild. I don't see why this isn't in games already (maybe the additional bandwidth usage?). Having VOIP would help out public grouping tremendously, and would make a world of difference in the large scale PVP battles that are planned.

    That being said, abuse controls would be a must. You would have to be able to mute an individual, or a channel, and you would need some system of reporting harassment. Normally harassment is easily reported from a chat log, not so easy with voice.
  • Such massive open world VoIP, that's positional and open to everyone would be damn hard to implement, and I bet massively stressful on the game itself, performance wise.

    I'd rather opt in to keep VoIP over 3rd party (ie. discord) while letting my game give me more FPS and less lag instead.

    Also yes, there is no way in hell you would keep trolling out of it. People would swarm in to troll as much as possible.

    Maaaaaybe if it could be configured that you can only hear people on your friend list and not randoms... or if VoIP had it's own block list....

    But still, the stress on the game performance it would take... I would rather vote no on this.
  • my experience with voip in games was with eve online. At the time it was buggy and seldom used unless TS went down. It did get better after a few months.

    Plus you dont have to use it if you have discord or another comms programs.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited July 2017

    Plus you dont have to use it if you have discord or another comms programs.
    It's not about our own PCs (clients).

    Problem is even if I (for example) wouldn't use integrated VoIP, many, many others would, and as such it would cause a huge amount of load on the SERVER performance.

    Ashes will be a MMO with massive open world, large scale battles, all running on Unreal 4 engine. Even in it's bare form this will be a huge stress on performance, and we will be looking for every FPS, and every ms we can squeeze out.

    We don't need Ashes cramped up with massively used VoIP in addition to that.
  • Discord is love, Discord is life.
  • I think it would be great if it was handled the right way. there would have to be a way to block on wanted voices.
  • I'm obviously in favour of this, I was excited when they announced it for WoW several years ago (When I still played) But the issue is usually quality. But having the tool, especially for random groups can be amazing. Though, I think most guilds and guild alliances will gravitate towards the popular voip programs. It used to be Vent and TS, then for a while it was Mumble. Now it's Discord.

    So yea, as long as they can promise decent quality, and offer moderation tools for private channels, and the ability to mute people with open microphones. I'm all in favour, though, it's not super high on my list. I'm not a programmer, and I profess no knowledge of game design. However, I'd prefer them to flesh out and make the other promised things work well. They can always add this in a patch later. Whereas certain systems will shape people's first impressions. Something a lot of games don't recover from all that well.
  • Duninn said:
    Discord is love, Discord is life.
    I totally agree! If Discord had positional audio integration like some of the other voip systems then it would be the ideal solution to this in my opinion.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited July 2017
    IF anyone wants to see what positional/spatial voice is like in an mmo setting, then watch any number of Day Z videos on youtube.  There are even plenty of trolling/scary ones.  I actually find it quite amusing, and can lead to some awesome lols.  However, one of the positives for it in this game would be explaining boss/fight mechanics or coordinating pvp really easy.  Intrepid could make it optional, or a toggle feature.  Personally I'm for it. 
  • Warkov said:
    IF anyone wants to see what positional/spatial voice is like in an mmo setting, then watch any number of Day Z videos on youtube.  There are even plenty of trolling/scary ones.  I actually find it quite amusing, and can lead to some awesome lols.  However, one of the positives for it in this game, it would make explaining boss/fight mechanics or coordinating pvp really easy.  Intrepid could make it optional, or a toggle feature.  Personally I'm for it. 
    What about PvP? I mean, say the arena like we'll see in Pax. If proximity works, the enemy team should also hear it, no? Could make things interesting, but most likely will just make people use voip programs
  • I think Voip would be a powerful tool and that is why other tools have been made to allow this outside of the game.  The tools outside of the game also have some advantages for limiting the number of voices and limiting the number of voices that need to be controlled and moderated.

    The controlled part of this is not all mic's are created equal and trying to manage tuning the volume for every person in range will be so atrociously hard that I would probably turn it off for that reason alone.  Imagine the person 50 ft away in game coming through louder than the person you are trying to chat with right in front of you.  I have played with people that will not enter general chat in Voip programs limited to guilds because it is distracting with five or ten voices that are not completing the same tasks.  That would easily be a minimum in a node.  Imagine going to a large group event in a node where there could be a hundred or more voices in range.  Good luck hearing anything but the dull roar of a hundred voices.  I am a fan of really good sound in games, that makes an immersive experience.  Five or ten random conversations from players does not make it immersive but may be a detriment to immersion.

    The moderation of voice necessitates some kind of voice capture and retention to provide any ability for moderation of Voip.  As for an ignore list, I would argue for an opt in list not an opt out list.  In other words, I have to turn your voice on to hear it not turn it off if I do not wish to hear it.  What is the first chat channel that many players turn off?  Zone chat.  This makes zone voip just additional development with limited use.  @Gothix gave the additional reasons that Voip is just additional transmission overhead previously which honestly should be enough to put an end to in game voip as it is.

    Others have talked about and I will reiterate the need to develop the game mechanics without the need to fix what is not broken.  Let voice programs deal with voice, leave the moderation of voice to the owners of the channels in the voice programs and ensure that we all get the game mechanics that IS has described for us.  If you can develop in game voice after that and fit the voice data in the crevices of data transmission for the game overall and not increase the transmission load then maybe.  But I think there are a list of other development areas that have a higher priority.  Honestly, if it is there, I will give a try and as soon as it is annoying, turn it off and never look back.
  • Ariatras said:
    Warkov said:
    IF anyone wants to see what positional/spatial voice is like in an mmo setting, then watch any number of Day Z videos on youtube.  There are even plenty of trolling/scary ones.  I actually find it quite amusing, and can lead to some awesome lols.  However, one of the positives for it in this game, it would make explaining boss/fight mechanics or coordinating pvp really easy.  Intrepid could make it optional, or a toggle feature.  Personally I'm for it. 
    What about PvP? I mean, say the arena like we'll see in Pax. If proximity works, the enemy team should also hear it, no? Could make things interesting, but most likely will just make people use voip programs
    They could separate by group in the arenas.  Or in the game, they could keep group voice separated from normal voice, via a toggle.
  • Warkov said:
    Ariatras said:
    Warkov said:
    IF anyone wants to see what positional/spatial voice is like in an mmo setting, then watch any number of Day Z videos on youtube.  There are even plenty of trolling/scary ones.  I actually find it quite amusing, and can lead to some awesome lols.  However, one of the positives for it in this game, it would make explaining boss/fight mechanics or coordinating pvp really easy.  Intrepid could make it optional, or a toggle feature.  Personally I'm for it. 
    What about PvP? I mean, say the arena like we'll see in Pax. If proximity works, the enemy team should also hear it, no? Could make things interesting, but most likely will just make people use voip programs
    They could separate by group in the arenas.  Or in the game, they could keep group voice separated from normal voice, via a toggle.
    Yea, that's just simple group VO. But if it's spatial/positional. If the enemy is close enough, they should hear it too, is what I was trying to say.
  • Gothix said:
    Such massive open world VoIP, that's positional and open to everyone would be damn hard to implement, and I bet massively stressful on the game itself, performance wise.

    I'd rather opt in to keep VoIP over 3rd party (ie. discord) while letting my game give me more FPS and less lag instead.

    Also yes, there is no way in hell you would keep trolling out of it. People would swarm in to troll as much as possible.

    Maaaaaybe if it could be configured that you can only hear people on your friend list and not randoms... or if VoIP had it's own block list....

    But still, the stress on the game performance it would take... I would rather vote no on this.
    There is no technical reason that in game VoIP would be more performance intensive than a 3rd party program. On the server side, you would just run voice through a separate server from the game server. There would be a little overhead if you wanted positional tracking in, but there would be no difference on the client side.

    You would obviously have issues with positional tracking, especially with the potential scale of battles, there could be times where even a very close voice radius would require communicating with dozens of other people and there is no easy fix for this.

    I'm thinking more along the lines of replacing group chat with voice. This would eliminate any performance problems, it would implicitly be opt in, and it would allow random groups formed out in the middle of nowhere to be as effective as guild groups. Depending on the implementation of the large scale battle grounds, this could be a key factor.

    In fact, the devs could just licence of the shelf VoIP tech and implement it specifically for groups, like a discord that is automatically set up on party creation.
  • Warkov said:
    IF anyone wants to see what positional/spatial voice is like in an mmo setting, then watch any number of Day Z videos on youtube.  There are even plenty of trolling/scary ones.  I actually find it quite amusing, and can lead to some awesome lols.  However, one of the positives for it in this game would be explaining boss/fight mechanics or coordinating pvp really easy.  Intrepid could make it optional, or a toggle feature.  Personally I'm for it. 
    This ^
  • Ketchup said:
    If this was to be a feature then I think it will be quite interesting to hear what people say to you in the open world as it has been said that this game is going to be open PVP, I think it will have a huge affect on the the community for many things such as trading and for competitive PVP. But it could be a bad idea as look at the game "Rust" (Yes I am quoting this game as I'm quite new to MMO's and not seen any others with this feature), this could lead to a bad affect and a toxic community, hopefully it doesn't turn out like that but it could be a good feature for the RPG side of things as the game is economy based, so you can talk your deals and talk to your customers which can have a good affect on the players thoughts on the game as this will be making the game more personal if a feature was implemented.

    Thanks for reading this :smiley:

    You've never been subjected to the in game chat before?. All you will hear is filth abuse race hate an porn.... sadly todays gamers are by an large  feral.
  • my experience with voip in games was with eve online. At the time it was buggy and seldom used unless TS went down. It did get better after a few months.

    Plus you dont have to use it if you have discord or another comms programs.
    There's a year and a half till alpha, so you never know if it's going to be a thing or not, I just thought that the feature would be useful for a lot of Node related things like Merchants and as the game is quite economy base I can see sellers trying to sell you there items haha
  • Frogie said:
    Ketchup said:
    If this was to be a feature then I think it will be quite interesting to hear what people say to you in the open world as it has been said that this game is going to be open PVP, I think it will have a huge affect on the the community for many things such as trading and for competitive PVP. But it could be a bad idea as look at the game "Rust" (Yes I am quoting this game as I'm quite new to MMO's and not seen any others with this feature), this could lead to a bad affect and a toxic community, hopefully it doesn't turn out like that but it could be a good feature for the RPG side of things as the game is economy based, so you can talk your deals and talk to your customers which can have a good affect on the players thoughts on the game as this will be making the game more personal if a feature was implemented.

    Thanks for reading this :smiley:

    You've never been subjected to the in game chat before?. All you will hear is filth abuse race hate an porn.... sadly todays gamers are by an large  feral.
    If maybe you had a certain role or job a such in the game then you can have it like the government of a node or merchants trying to sell things 
  • I would love to hear in game voice chat and join in to of course. Not easy to moderate though but then nether is zone chat
  • It's useful, but I wouldn't use it. I'll disable it. I have some PTSD with CS:GO. Since I'm not going to do any dungeons or events which require a vocal chat with randoms, I'm fine.
  • Just use something like discord or TS if you need voice chat.
  • I have no interest in a voice chat in my MMO. Mostly cause break of immersion when hearing a man's voice coming out of a female avatar, or the other way around when it is my own case, since I do plan to have on of my characters be a guy.

    MMOs are about immersion, the last thing you want to do is break that, as it then ruins the game. If people have to VOIP, they can use clients for that feature.
  • I've been away for a week or so, so I could have forgotten about everything, but I'm sure that this has been mentioned in the past by the dev's.....

    As to in game voice chat, I vaguely remember at one point playing a game with incorporated voice chat, and immersion wasn't an issue, I just turned it off whenever it became a pest. 

    Otherwise, it was of definite benefit, and you had no excuse to not at the very least be listening to others during dungeons, it made random grouping much less b*tchy in my experience. 
  • Megs said:
    I've been away for a week or so, so I could have forgotten about everything, but I'm sure that this has been mentioned in the past by the dev's.....

    As to in game voice chat, I vaguely remember at one point playing a game with incorporated voice chat, and immersion wasn't an issue, I just turned it off whenever it became a pest. 

    Otherwise, it was of definite benefit, and you had no excuse to not at the very least be listening to others during dungeons, it made random grouping much less b*tchy in my experience. 
    I can see where you are coming from, it has its advantages and disadvantages, but it seems like a good idea :smile:
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