No need for Ventrillo in future patch?

http://e3.gamespot.com/story.html?sid=6174183&pid=928901&tag=top_stories;title;3

Someone posted this on my guild forums and didn't see anything about it here, so it might be OFN but it's news to me.

Blizzard also plans to release additional, smaller patch updates before then that will add two new features: integrated voice chat and guild banks. Voice chat will be added to the game free of charge, will mute the game slightly whenever someone talks (so that you won't need to talk over any onscreen battles), and will use onscreen icons to indicate who's saying what, so that you'll be able to quickly determine which team member in your party is asking for help. The guild banks, on the other hand, will let guild officers create vaults to store the guild's entire possessions, as well as set permissions to limit access to certain items if they care to do so.

Obviously I think it's an awesome idea and hope it works well enough although I've never had a problem using Vent. BUT I'm also a Mac WoWer, so I'm sure that the Speex codec isn't the best and not everyone wants to use it.

I'm suspecting a minor patch tomorrow, but I'd be more banking on fixing the orc shoulder pad issue. Something like voice chat I would think would have to be in the PTR for a bit first.

Guild bank could go both ways. It would be really awesome (lots of space, toggleable power to desposit/withdraw in Guild Control ranks, deposit coin) or it could be really awful (give you just one extra "normal player" bank account).

Hmm last time I read something about this it was on the general forums @ worldofwarcraft.com .. The blue responded that these two things were ideas they had but had no immediate plans to implement them.. I think it was under the topic "Guild Houses" or something like that if you wanted to search..

The in-game chat will most likely not be as good as Vent. I doubt many/any serious guilds will drop it unless Blizzard does something out of character. It's the same thing as SCT/Raid Mods/etc. Blizzard copies the idea, and implements it in a way that the originals are still better.

I don't want blizzard to keep track of what I'm saying. I have a potty mouth, so I'll push to keep vent.

They aren't Google - I doubt they're going to be analyzing your speech.

They made posts about both of these being part of a future patch on or before the next "content patch" and it was confirmed by a few blue posts.

They will be in the game at some point, both of them.

My question is this.. if they can't maintain a hardware aspect that exists for their current server/player functions... what the hell do they think adding voice to this will create? How reliable will the voice servers be?

The integrated voice chat will be fine for pugs, but for guilds it is still better to use vent, so somebody can call out that the disconnected or wow crashed.

If it will only work for people in your team or raid, or if it will be setup like chat in wow where you could make your own rooms.

its only party/raids from what i read

its only party/raids from what i read

Yea, I'd guess it'd be like a dedicated channel that gets created and you moved into it whenever you join a group.

Like if you join a 10man raid you'll all be moved to a channel just for those in that raid.

Nobody knows for sure until it happens, but if they plan on making it successful they're going to have to do something about the bandwidth and horsepower required to connect that many players, and they've got a shitty track record with that already on the main servers

they may likely implement the voice traffic using p2p (peer to peer) and have their servers only serve as a management role. perhaps optimizing it: to avoid having a single speaker dup the same voice packet 39 times to their raid, they could send it only 6-7 times to their lowest latency neighbors which would in turn be forwarded to 6-7 more people for a total of (6-7)^2 = 39 people. in an environment where only 1 person speaks at a time in a limited sized network i think this would be ideal and better than vent (for the server).

considering how blizzard likes to offload any high volume data like patches via bittorrent i dont think my theory is too far off. and 1 packet of voice data is larger than all the game data a raid transfers combined... (then multiply that voice data by 39).

hey you should make a big happy flag for herbs n shit that'd be cool

its called gatherer

They aren't Google - I doubt they're going to be analyzing your speech.

wait wait, google analyzes my voice?!?!

google touches you when you sleep

That explains a lot actually.

Voice Chat:
Yes Voice Chat is planned for 2.2. No it is not available yet. When it is available expect an announcement because we intend to do a lot of testing on it.


WoW Forums -> ATTN: Current PTR issues July 23 2007 (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.co m/thread.html;jsessionid=8E 58A0971D9614946DD70CA496B C9EFF?topicId=442887421&sid=1)

The in-game chat will most likely not be as good as Vent. I doubt many/any serious guilds will drop it unless Blizzard does something out of character. It's the same thing as SCT/Raid Mods/etc. Blizzard copies the idea, and implements it in a way that the originals are still better.

Yep.

Plus, guild vents are places to "hang" and the new voice thing is likely to be solely for same raid-party members. Great for pugs and 5mans, perhaps, but not likely to replace vent for raids and arena teams.

I'm just really looking forward to it for pugs and 5-mans.

I'm really not looking forward it.

I can't think of how many times I had to do "esc > playerlist > ingame-voice mute" in counter-strike because some people are just annoying as fuck intentionally.