[MUD-Dev] online voice communication

[Matt Mihaly]

I just thought I'd post a couple comments on the Xbox Live's voice
communication, which has been much-ballyhooed by Microsoft. Been
using it since Friday when it was released at retail.

Pros
----

  1. Good quality sound. When not using the voice masking, the
  voices come through quite nicely and fairly promptly.

  2. When I compare Unreal Tournament on the DC to Unreal
  Championship on the Xbox, I notice while you often got irritating
  idiots spamming channels on the DC (keyboard communication only)
  with foul language and such, I have seen none of that at all so
  far in what is basically the same game on the Xbox. I think the
  fact that voice seems a lot less anonymous acts to inhibit the
  impulse to be an annoying jerk.

Cons
----

  1. The voice masking is horrible. Using it will usually get people
  asking you to stop using it.

  2. Decreased functionality. MS seems to have limited the voice
  channels to 4 people per channel. What this means is that there is
  no way that I can see for a team of more than 4 people to
  communicate with each other. It's incredibly annoying to me that
  the communication options on the Dreamcast (again, for basically
  the same game, Unreal) were far superior, due to the fact that I
  could communicate with my whole team at once, and could also
  communicate with the enemy.

  3. Voice is awkward. My experience is significantly diminished
  when I realize that the big Juggernaught I'm teaming with sounds
  like a 13 year old, because, in fact, that's what he is. At least
  in text the illusion can be maintained longer. Perhaps decent
  voice masking would fix this.

  4. Unbelievably, among the two Xbox Live games I've played so far
  (MechAssault, which is like MechWarrior, but apparently made for
  the mentally challenged, and Unreal), neither gives you any
  indication who is speaking. You just have no idea, unless people
  preface everything they say with their screen name. That is, of
  course, annoying as hell to do, so people don't do it.

Overall, this experience has, so far, seriously soured me on using
voice in games. If I was playing exclusively with my friends, I
could see it being useful, but so far I don't have any other friends
with Xbox Live. In fact, it makes me a little angry to consider that
Microsoft couldn't even manage to give me an experience,
communication-wise, superior to my beloved little Dreamcast. (The
service generally beats the pants off the DC's dial-up modem of
course.)

--matt

While our government scrambles to find Arabic speakers and
translators, and bemoans their scarcity, they have the gall to
discharge more than 10 percent of this year's Arabic language
students at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey because of
their sexual orientation. Bunch of rednecks and hicks.


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev