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When Ventrilo goes wrong
Ventrilo, Teamspeak, and other voice chat programs can be a great tool for coordinating raids. They can also be a great tool for inappropriate comments to completely wipe an otherwise normal raid. This definitely-not-safe-for-work and possibly-your-sanity Vent recording of an younger kid desperately trying to fit in with the older raiders on a tryout run in Blackwing Lair shows that -- the kid's comments end up distracting the raid so much that the group accidentally pulls Broodlord. (Note: You have been warned about the Vent recording, since it will scar you for life and make you really wonder about the youth of America.) This has set some people reminiscing about the best comments they've heard on Vent, and the effect it can have on unprepared raids. Back in the day, when I was a noob 60 just beginning to run Scholomance, my guild leader -- who I was utterly terrified of -- laid down while we were recuperating our mana between pulls and started singing songs from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical on Vent. I started singing along, he choked on a cigarette, and we both started laughing. In the ensuing hysteria, which NO ONE else on the run understood, I somehow managed to run directly into two groups of mobs. We wiped and I was not allowed to talk to the guild leader in runs anymore. Do you have any horrible Ventrilo wipe stories to tell?
MMO VoIP: cross-reality calling
Telecoms startup Vivox has an intriguing vision, and an ambitiously-named product; "Immersion" aims to add voice chat to online games, with both persistent chat for guilds and dynamic chat for instancing. The product also seems to tie together various text-based chat methods, including regular messengers such as Yahoo and AIM as well as in-game chat.By supplying the (scalable) infrastructure for this service, Vivox hope Immersion will take the burden of providing voice chat away from game manufacturers, while making communication centralised and seamless for players. However, there are already several products that already achieve this -- many guilds have Ventrilo or TeamSpeak servers, while Xfire provides cross-game chatting. Vivox can go either way; it could corner another segment of this fragmented market, or -- if the company manage to deal directly with game developers -- it could become the one-stop-shop communication solution for gamers regardless of their MMO of choice.It'll be interesting to see which way the company goes; voice chat is certainly billed as the next stage of interactivity with MMOs, with Xbox Live gamers testifying to the added dimensions voice can add to various game genres. A recent press release on Vivox's website points to another direction in which the technology could become useful -- adding voice and centralised communication to online dating and social sites -- but reaching saturation point is going to be a tricky ride.[Via Gamesblog; City of Heroes screenshot from GameAmp]
