Question for Illusionists

Why does voice not make sense? Its a quick and effective way to convey ideas while still playing the game.

If you stop and type you aren't playing while you type. Also, I would say even for the fastest typer in most cases voice is much faster then typing. Also, people tend to watch what is going on in the fight then what is going on in their chat window. Not saying they don't look but.... you ALWAYS hear something when your fighting...reading text..whatever. It is a very effective way to achieve teamwork.

I don't know what most guilds do in a raid but I would be willing to bet all my gear that any guild that raids t7...and the much harder t7 effectivley...uses voice communication.

Despise? I guess if you are a social hermit. :smileyhappy:

I don't really like to do it with pick up groups, but in a raid with 24 players that need to mesh well and quickly.....voice makes alot of sense.
Message Edited by Barobrain on 07-12-2006 12:21 PM

Yes, I would say I despise it too, and I am not a social hermit. I despise it because I like to roleplay, and my voice sounds absolutely nothing like my character's voice. In addition, hearing a female character speak with a deep baritone over voice servers simply freaks me out.
You don't have to be a social hermit to dislike voice chat in an MMOG.
Admittedly, if you are heavily into raiding and you don't care much about roleplay and your main objective it simply to be as efficient as humanly possible so that you don't mess up your chance to win your uber pixels, then yes...voice chat is probably a better option tha old fashioned text chat.

you know, if u got one of those sound blaster cards, u can have it automatically change ur voice to a woman's voice when u speak over the mic? of course im assuming ur a guy hehe.

You just totally ignored every point I made.

I get your point ... but if you are strict about it ... infight typing does not seem very RP like to me also ... my guess is that anyone in a real fight would rather shout than hand over a note he wrote in combat ... personally I just like to use efficient tools and get a break from all the typing I have to do at work
With some of the guys I am playing EQII with I played various other games for at least four years now ... I also have met most of them on several LAN partys - so I know their voice and I know how they look like in RL anyway ... there is still room for some non-verbal RP in non combat situations
anyway - just different playstyles I guess - have fun! .... and sorry for the little thread-highjacking!

Yes.

i just start abusing the one that breaks it (its the fun part about pickup groups) lol

In reply to the OP, it's a well know problem and it's a huge one. But I don't blame the players. It's simply too hard to suddenly change everything you've always been doing just because there's a chanter in the group. The blame for this problem falls squarely in SOE's lap. They KNEW enchanters and other CC classes wouldn't be able to function in the environment they were providing. They KNEW they shouldn't include enchanters in EQ2. But they cynically did it anyway for marketing reasons.

There is nothing in this MMOG or any other MMOG that is so difficult that it requires the voicechat crutch to beat.

I was in a guild in WoW that made ventrillo a raid requirement.... as well as CT raid assist. They were a decent guild but we wiped a lot and people just weren't very good. There wasn't much drama but there was a lot of finger pointing in voicechat whenever we'd wipe.
It got to the point where I'd just log on to the server and mute it. I knew the encounters and knew my job. I didn't really need any further instruction.
After a while I left that guild and joined another that was at roughly the same point in the game. They had no requirement for voicechat for raids. The raid leader was clear concise and very well respectd in the guild. He made sure everyone knew their roles and what they needed to do. There were very few screwups and the guild worked very well together. We rarely wiped but when we did, the raidleader told everyone what happened and why it happened and what we should do if it happens again.

My point is that the guild without voicechat was more successful that the guild who relied on voicechat.


If you stop and type you aren't playing while you type. Also, I would say even for the fastest typer in most cases voice is much faster then typing
If the success of a raid is dependant on one single person pressing one hotkey hotkey at an exact moment, you're screwed anyway. This game simply doesn't require 100% concentration.

Also, people tend to watch what is going on in the fight then what is going on in their chat window
This is ridiculous but sadly true. I've had people tell me to stop chatting in group chat because it was distracting them from tanking... but if you have someone on your raid that has a difficult time reading a chat window while concentrating on a raid, they might be more comfortable playing checkers.
Some people also try to say that it's easier to hear instructions in voicechat. The actuality is that proper instructions, typed out in raid chat is far easier to follow.
What if there is static on the mike?
What if someone misunderstood?
What if you have players of different nationalities?

Written communication is far more accurate. A player can also scroll back in the chat buffer if they missed any instructions or of they happened to be afk.

I see some people say that it makes raiding easier... but what is that based on? Have you ever raided without using voicechat? Have you ever tried? Has there ever been an instance where split second instructions in raid chat made the difference between a win and a wipe? If so could those instructions not have been communicated in text just as effectively?
I doubt many of the most vocal advocates for voicechat in MMOGs have ever raided without it.

I played EQ1 back when teamspeak was not around (or any kind of voice period). Broadband was just beginning. I have raided with 100 people in EQ1 taking down a dragon and sure we used text. But then again all we did was zerg the encounter (have seen chain complete heal strats and this is a nightmare with text). There just was not much strat. They really did bring that to eq2 raids (which I gladly accept). Not to mention only 24 people can raid! What a blessing that is to.

Voice is just logically a faster and easier way to quickly convey everything that is going on and what needs to happen. Maybe you didn't have a guild that used voice efficiently. To say point blank its useless I think is a little short sighted.

But everyone has their opinion. Like I said before, and was posted by others here, to take down a t7 contested or some of the more advanced encounters in the t7 raid instances, voice is invaluable. Could it be done without? Sure, but you can also walk to Washington from Florida, but wouldn't you rather fly? :smileyhappy:

So have either of you two actually raided T7 without voicechat?

yes

In response to the origional post...
sometimes crowd controll isn't needed. Sometimes the people in your group would just rather AE stuff down. In pick up groups I don't mez unless we get a LOT of adds. Then, if they break the mezes, I usually wait to die. In guild groups I don't mez much either, unless the situation warrents it... ie; lots of adds. Too many characters in the game have AE attacks and are too excited about using them to make crowd controll anything more than a bother.
Under the description of my mez spells it says it removes the mob from the AE effect of spells unless the spell is directly targeting them. That's only partially true. MY ae spells don't damage mobs I've mezzed, but everyone else's spells do.
So when I solo I use my AEs frequently because even against single targets, Color Storm (or whatever version i'm using now) is good DPS. but when I'm grouping, I blast the AEs right along with everyone else, and be sure to assist the tank. =)
One last point; crowd controll isn't as big an issue in most of the game as it was in EQ1. Most of us here wish it was... that's why we made the toons we did... but it's not.