[MUD-Dev] DGN: Effect of voice chat on game design

[Damion Schubert]

Mike Rozak [mailto:Mike at mxac.com.au] wrote:
> Damion Schubert wrote:

>> If we had time and resources, we'd love to integrate voice chat,
>> but without that time and resources, we're happy to point our
>> customers to 3rd party solutions.  We're also happy that our
>> customers are willing to take the bandwidth costs onto
>> themselves.

> Do you think that if you added voice-chat that most Shadowbane
> players would use it?

I thimk a very high percentage of Shadowbane users already use a 3rd
party utility.  But then, we're a hardcore game.

> How much "better" (aka: more fun) could you make the voice chat if
> you integrated it yourself? Would you be able to charge an extra
> $5/month (or whatever) to cover the extra bandwidth?

In our case, it'd take a lot of work.  One of the bad things about
our current situation that I'd love to fix is that it doesn't tie
automatically into group structures that exist into the game - I'd
love it if your adventuring party all joined the same chat channel.
On the other hand, players also use TS to talk outside of game-
mandated groups - for example, the leaders of five nations in an
alliance might be coordinating with each other in a siege.

As I said before, I'd love to take some of these issues head on, but
there are quite a few things on the list ahead of voice chat for
Shadowbane, especially when some 3rd party programs exists and are
likely higher quality than anything we could do.

>> The largest argument against is, simply put, the amazing ability
>> for players to be as annoying and abrasive as possible.  One of
>> the fallouts of our 3rd party reliance is that you will never go
>> around town square and hear players chatter randomly - you'll
>> only hear people who you've actively let connect to your TS
>> server.  Some might say this is bad, but I'd argue it works out
>> well.  You're not likely to hear someone else spout out vile,
>> racist talk that we cannot easily filter, store or police

> In text, you can a) filter out swearwords, and b) keep a log of
> all text spoken. I discovered that filtering swearwords was mostly
> useless because people came up with variations, just as filtering
> spam-words (like medicine names) from E-mail doesn't work
> anymore. The log is handy as evidence though.

It's not just swear words (although that's a problem).  I actually
stopped playing Unreal: Tournament largely because it became hard to
find a game where someone didn't insist on telling the rest of the
team how drunk he was, or cranking his gangsta rap for all to enjoy.

Text is infinitely easier for a human being to ignore than sound.

--d
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