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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.
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In short I am curious xD
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.
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.
Plus you dont have to use it if you have discord or another comms programs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.