Non
- "You want to what!?"
- Male
- 30 Years Old
- Chicago, IL
- US
- Quote ""Life is tough. It's even tougher if you're..."
- Plays: Alganon, Fallen Earth, EVE, LOTRO
- Interests: Archery & Hunting
- Offline
Hopelessly addicted to online gaming from the day I connected to my first BBS with a 2400 baud modem. Since then I've bought and played every pay to play MMO I've been able to find on the market. Imagine what I could do with all that time and money now, ha.
I remember a time when playing mmo's forced you to enhance your ability to type and use your keyboard with weasel fast movements. I could navigate a character on autorun through any content in the game and have a conversation by the paragraph in guildchat without even thinking about it.
I didnt mind it; it kept my typing skills sharper than a secretary pumping out 90 wpm all day. I didn't know the age or sex of anyone I was talking to, their letters couldnt really annoy me, there were no accents/speech impediments to make it difficult for me to understand them, and even if they had rather horrid personalities it really didnt come out TOO much through text chat. They were for better or worse their character and as I came to find out later on in my gaming life, that was probably for the better.
This brings me to the wide spread use of voice chat applications. Ventrilo & Teamspeak are the widely used apps now; there is a smattering of other apps out there. I started using voice comms in FPS games for quick communication during competition games. Our communications were quick and concise, there was nothing else broadcasted and so this became a very nice thing to have. As time wore on voice comms started to play a bigger role in the mmo games I was playing. I quickly found myself in soandso's random voice server for the group content we were doing or constantly in the guild voice server for raids, leveling, bsing, etc. When I was in a server with organized people it was usually more of a blessing, but at times it was a bane.
Most of the folks I spent my time in voice comms with had learned of volume equalization. Attempting to get everyone near the same level of input and output volumes even though they all use different equipment. Easy to do if someone knows their equipment and the application well enough. A daunting task if they do not, leading to a lot of wasted time, frustration, and a complete lack of fun.
Unfortunately there are still a fair amount of people out there that seem to have no clue about this and jump into a voice comm server with the classic, "Hey, whats up?" only to have everyone else in the channel cry in agony or say, couldn't hear you, say that again? This is run into often enough and the person is always told they are too loud or too quiet and asked to adjust their settings. To which of course they will reply oh I dont know how, and we will either deal with their problem for the duration of our activity together or someone will spend entirely too much time walking them through changing their settings or failing at changing their settings and effectively punishing everyone else for their ignorance.
So please, if you run a voice communication server or are a user, be familiar with your equipment and settings. Know how to equalize your volume as each server may differ a bit and realize that the voice comms are there to let us work better together, have fun chatting, and let everyone have some mic time. Nobody wants to hear your play by play or some type of household ruckus going on in the background. Ill not get into the background noise and mic hogs at the moment as its an entirely different discussion
