Warning to Ventrilo Users

Oh I agree, its not the nicest looking thing at all, but who cares when its sitting in the background


I'd much rather clunky interface and slightly poorer sound quality than these kind of things happening!.. its just not worth it!

Voice communication is something which I feel is VITAL, and its so important that its reliable.. esp in any form of PvP..

the extra bling bling that Vent gives, is so not worth it.

TS FTW

First time it ever happened though.

Although ANET say they are working on this, which is great.. I kind of agree on the bandwidth issue!

and seriously guys.. you try built-in voice on CS or any half-life engines, I even tried the DDO built in voice... and I have to say, if you think Teamspeak sound quality isnt very good, build-in vox is REALLY bad!! :-/

Plus you wont have the ability to stop spamming on the mic or bad language being used..

ANET will give themselves a bucket load of problems if they introduce vox comms, I just think they should get some good deals with TS hosting companys..

and please NOT GAME DAEMONS!!! the most utterly *beeeep* TS provider in the world!... two paper cups and a peice of string is more reliable!

Yeah, that is sad. In fact, last night a random person hopped onto our channel and started being a right pain in the arse. Other than that i have had no real bad experience with public vent servers. That, on the other hand is just terrible.

For me TS its not just the clunky interface, and the poor sound quality, it does tend to make a mess of things when more than one person is talking at once. Thing can get pretty hectic with team 1 and 2 leaders giving orders, conditions and hexes being called, as a well as spikes. With TS it tends to turn into something like this:

'Team 1 move forward to....this target, spike on....Diversion on.....2,1 spike!...blind on...Team 2 fall back a bit please'

You've been very lucky!

Not sure I understand this properly but if you were sponsored why were you on a public server? Doesn't exactly sound like "the best you could get" to me.

Also, don't forget that the majority of BF2 servers are privately rented. Unless you are playing on "EA official EC blah blah" then chances are your on a Clan's server that is paying monthly for it. So yes, while BF2 does have in game VOIP "for free" it's not costing EA anything, as it's not their bandwidth.. it's the clan's bandwidth and server side resources that are being eaten up.

Compare this to GW where 100Ks players are all hosted by the same servers\datacenters (divided by region if looking at that Tech support tool means anything). 50 people (or 250, whatever) connected to a single BF2 server somewhere, or 50,000 east coast players connected the GW server farm in DC.

'Clunky interface" is actually an opinion - not a fact.
Many seem to prefer this 'clunky' interface.

Sound quality for both is negligble for 2 reasons. The first is that sound quality is dictated by the codec used and they use pretty much the same codec for most video game voice servers. If your server sound quality is poor you need to request for support of less compressed codec. The second reason is that as long as you are not using heavily compressed codec setting, the difference in other codecs is very hard to distinguish because you would need to make a significant jump to hear a difference (say 14 vs 28).

They prefer it because you can use it on a cruddy computer, not because they like it more.

And TS, regardless of Codec, is worse than Vent.

If you got the same conditions on both a TS and Vent server, the sound on the TS server will be worse. And its NOTICABLE.

So you are speaking for the thousands of TS users because you intimately know all of them?


Stating an opinion does not make it a fact.


Stating a personal experience without broader proof is not fact.
Again, I think you have a misunderstanding on how these voice servers and clients work.
For the last time, the audio quality is strictly controlled by your soundcard, codec setting, codec support and connection quality of all the clients. And improvement the client software makes is artificial - likely using filterting. But that is not quatifiable and neither of the system have such unless set by the user.

Yea, I agree, if you look very closley at all the settings in teamspeak they very often default to a 'low resource' option!...

Also, Ventrillo was initially designed as an internet telephone service, but TS is specifically gaming, so again, the settings are all lower to use less resources!

Again, its not fair to argue the two... lets just say that if you use any kind of voice-comms your all ready a MUCH better GW player than those who dont in my opinion.

guys, you dont want built in voice comms.. its terrible in every game ive ever seen it tried in. bad quality and lag like you can beleive.

TS or Vent are far better solutions.

ive always preferred TS .. and for the record, both programs are capable of the same codecs and sound quality with a little tweaking, so quality isnt really an issue. TS defaults to lower than Vent, thus the perception that one is better.. when in fact it really isnt.

6 of one, half dozen of the other ..its just preference, but do not push built in comms, please

Well.. I know TS servers for whatever reason you want to make up, are not liked often. then most obvious reason I can think of is that you don't have the equipment to run a private server for your non profit gaming group... If that's the case then I guess Vent is all you got to go with.

The problem seems to be that vent has no way to privatize their system to secure access from DDoS style attacks...

The nice thing on Private TS servers that if you set them up properly you can have it completely delisted from the TS lobby system and only allow access to the server with password and authorized user names...

Then you can use whatever codecs you want even the same codecs that are on Vent for that matter... its all in how you set it up...

I rarely need anything better then GSM 16.4 Kbit but I have used the speex 25.9 Kbit and not seen a huge difference in quality... I see a large jump in resources being used on the server however. This would be expected. and if they are using more resources and its not a separate machine its gonna lag up a system.

So that seems to be the key factor... Vent servers being default setup to use less compression in their codecs tend to lag if a server gets full. I guess thats why they are now adding GSM compression to emulate TS... cause with a TS server I can have up to 100 people on and have no problem at all. Again I would assume its all in how you want to set it up. The most I have ever had was around 50 in one channel. and it was not a problem as far as equipment goes... It was a problem on talking over each other but thats a normal comms problem... no matter what the system is. thats why normally you break out into squads subchannels in TS servers. especially for games like BF2. The Commander uses the BF2 VoIP to issue Battlefield commands, and the squads use TS comms in subchannels. It depends really...

As to the whole VoIP in game goes. I would be all for it if its handeled similar to how UT2k4 did it... Then you can use both options and it does not matter. It can go either way. However even if that option comes out I doubt that will pull me away from having a private TS server for our clan. We play to many games not to have a private system.

Yes, I do agree most of the time in game commun isnt the best idea, usually the quality is bad. For the most part ventrillo is okay so is teamspeak. There are many others things that are easily used and free. Such as skype, msn, gamecom and many more.

These all can be used but they do require a little more communcation just to get these start. Yes they are free. With this happening once again i feel this is very sad for my guild and my players. Within the community many people have offered us use of free private servers for all of you that did this we are very happy for your offers. At the moment we are using a private server with one of our good friends.

[PuP] would like to thank everyone for all of their recommendations and help. We do regard this very carefully and look at all sides of the issue. Either way we feel that most people that we have encountered have been kind nice people which does give hope in the GW community.

For the public vent servers, they might just be forgotten, for with a small price of a little banwidth your own server can be ran. This is just a little thing that be done to stop a high price (see thread to see price =D).

Thanks again
Syl

more like gg guild reputation and everyone in it

With the terrible lag issue lately for most of our guild....I would have to say NO to built in voice comms. There are already lots of people quiting due to the lag, In game Comms would only compound this.

Anet seems to have its hands full with just game balance and GW:F.

2 things with u post i would like to point out

1) im sure ONE of you atleast had channel admin, you can turn off pages. (thus they wont registere to the channel at all)

and

2) Being an administrator of ventrilo servers since their release there is no way to LOG who pages who as of yet, it is a feature of 2.5 they are working on, along with being able to log chat in teh server.

I know people who did similar things on AIM...called Punter/punting programs....basically just overload/lag you till you crashed out, by recieveing just random/multiple messages and texts very quickly....and memory/cache not being able to keep up.