If there was a general chat channel, that was comparable to 100, I think the whole voice chat in VO would be a little more exposed and become a bit more widely used.

As it is now, people don't even know there is voice chat until they are told by someone else, invited to a group, or if they join a guild.

Even when a newb is invited to a group, that doesn't mean that the person that invited them will tell them about the voice chat.

If everyone was put on the public chat channel automatically (if they had voice chat turned on), and had the ability to go from group to guild to public (if applicable) with a command, I think voice chat usage would go up.

Speaking from my experience with the "leakage" issue, I've met many people who I still consider to be my friend, from crossing channels with them accidentally. If there was a designated place to talk to new people, it would strengthen our community feel.

I think for most people, it is easier to have fun with someone you are actually speaking to.

+1 there should be a global voice chat channel. This would also give people a way to talk to their opponents without being in group, which might actually help put a person behind a pilot name and reduce some animosity. On the downside, it's a channel that would be hard to police so there should be a warning that there is no guarantee of PG-13 discussions.

There should also be publicly available nation voice chat channels, like channel 11. There should also be a grey space chat channel for people that don't align themselves to a particular nation.

+1 I like hearing voices rar

I sort-of agree. With major caveats. I've actually been thinking about this a bit, lately, but it has some challenges.

1) It will never be global across all platforms, because mobile users can't handle the bandwidth. The costs for people playing in some asian countries, listening to you guys banter, would be insane (and they might not know until it was too late). This is why VC is explicitly disabled on Android, and has to be manually enabled (with a warning, even). I think, right now, we're running an older speex codec in super-wideband at 32kbit/s, where the actual game user averages about 3kbit/s. So, over a factor of 10 in bandwidth usage for the individual player.

2) People being nasty and unpleasant would need a more rapid solution. Ability to ignore, having too many ignores trigger default-ignore (mute) for some period of time.. some kind of more nuanced thing. There have been a lot of advancements in this, from what Microsoft has done on Xbox, to what Riot Games has implemented for LoL. But, no matter what, the implementation will take a fair amount of development time.

3) This will cost us money in some way. Not necessarily very much money, and I think it's worth the cost in terms of the improved experience, but we'll be looking at pushing a hell of a lot more bandwidth through VC. If we can move to Opus wideband at 20kbit, that'll give us ~50 people per megabit. On the upside, Voice Chat is really orthogonal to the game itself, so it can be run from anywhere, including some lower-cost 100mbit unmetered machine somewhere. Conversely, it does still require a server-level connection to be able to update channels and memberships and so on, so if that connection goes down.. VC goes haywire, so placing it somewhere remote from the server (but cheap) may involve a VC reliability tradeoff.

4) Some people just won't want it at all. Best case, we offer people the option of turning it on, during install or account creation. And it would need to be pretty trivial to disable. Also, I guarantee that people will find new and exciting ways of being asshats. Voice chat usage on Xbox has been a source of considerable controversy, in terms of player behaviour. All of which goes back to #2, and that this may create a very large headache for us to manage.

But.. if we were able to handle all of that pretty well, I think it could be totally great, and a huge benefit to the game and the sense of community.

However, the fact that it is a non-trivial undertaking, with a few big "unknowns", should not be underestimated.

Also, I guarantee that people will find new and exciting ways of being asshats.

I went to find the famous LeberMac asshat medal, and now the link is broken - /tear.

This was floating around Google, but lacks the elegant simplicity and poignancy of LeberMeat's work:

Yeah, that's not nearly as cool as Leber's.

a channel that would be hard to police so there should be a warning that there is no guarantee of PG-13 discussions.

Such as "Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB"?

I guarantee that people will find new and exciting ways of being asshats.

All the spambot owners would use a text to speech plugin.

What about this baby step, Inc: what if there were a set of commands, with matching GUI buttons in the PDA > Comms tab for the mobile set, that created and discarded secure one-to-one and party-line channels that did not affect the participant's group status as far as missions are concerned?

First off, add a global voice chat enable/disable button in the Comms tab, so mobile users can access it quickly. Perhaps add the choice to the tutorial, saying: if you don't know, you can change it later here.

player1: /request voice-chat "player2 name" requests a one-on-one call
player2: /accept voice-chat "player1 name" player accepts a one-to-one call.
either player: /end voice-chat hangs up

This could be added to hails, so we could actually, you know... HAIL them. they can always opt for text only, if say their chambers coil is overloading their comm system ;) (i.e. text only)

Not sure how best to suggest a party line, but it would basically be just like a group, but not show each others' locations, and not affect missions. I would suggest that any invite to a party line would divulge to the invitee who was already on the call, in case their ex-boyfriend or current wife were there.

It would be AWESOME if in the comms tab you could switch between your current guild, group, party, and one-on-one voice chats.

You can do that by Friday, right? ;)

[P.S. a sector voice chat would be awesome too...]

To Inc's point about ignoring people, you'll need to display the person currently broadcasting so people know who to ignore. That's already a problem as you may be in guild chat and someone is mouth-breathing into the mic without push-to-talk, or playing music, and you need to poll guild chat to see who is running voice chat.

Additionally, the voice ignore should be separate from the ignore command, as you may want to ignore a person's speech but not their text.

Although this does sound good and yet NOT. The reason I say this is because compared to other games that already have good VC most players end up on a TC channels anyhow because it's more flexible.
IE: Channel creation, moderator assignment, individual volume controls for each player as needed.
TS3 already has everything needed including overlay.

However, TS3 might not be as desirable as it would reveal ongoing REAL player counts as well.
Global VC might be better in line with VO's apparent desire to withhold this information and would allow generic VC without showing users in the global chat, similar to how 100 works

So it's got pro's and cons with it but I guess overall might be good.

Simplest solution would be to stay outside of the commercial use policy and have a member pay for their own VO server and offer the global channel for free, but the admin part would be a pain for them.

How to change to 100

jfc

I've given this a lot of thought recently too, and although I'm not a developer of this game I do think I know where Inc is coming from. I do not think a global voice chat in VO will work for everyone, but I do think useage in groups/guilds only is quite restrictive.

My idea would be to extend voice chat to sector chat! Sure, this would still have most of the problems that Inc points out, except for bullying. Don't wanna voice chat with a certain ass-hat? Do not be in the sector he/she is in then, or shoot him/her and make them go away.

A global voice chat? Maybe...

A sector only voice chat? Yes please.

Basically, I'm going to start with generally create-able channels that people can just make, and invite others to join. So it's opt-in, but without limitations on the number of players. We'll see how that goes.

Making voice chat generally used in general gameplay locations (like sector chat), I'm not sure of yet. But it's a possibility. There's still the issue that I cannot default it to "on" for mobile players, so one cannot assume (even in a sector), that because you see someone, you'll be able to talk to them.

While you're at it, could you add moderation controls to these created VC channels?

Draugath, you didn't read the book? You gotta let him give us the cookie before we ask for milk!

Hmm, is it just me that thinks that real time chat ( and inevitably in time real time video ) is the antithesis of the concept of Role Playing?

I doubt it would bother me : I RP as a cantankerous old Nyrian miner. I look like one and sound like one in RL.

However I tend to feel that many bubbles would be burst when some folks voices are heard globally.

Really squeaky adolescent pirate demanding money? Don't even start me laughing at gender identification, either way round...

Just a thought.

On the plus side, we'd at least have some idea when certain pilots were flying while shitfaced from the distinctive word-slurring.

I can't do much about word-slurring, but technology to mask voices and change pitch / timbre in realtime is pretty widely available, and CPUs are pretty fast these days.

I went to find the famous LeberMac asshat medal, and now the link is broken - /tear.

Broken, yes, but with a little Wayback Machine magic, thankfully not lost forever.