Is your guild switching to discord?

[threeks]

I wish my guild would ... I think they have one that they use for just chat (only a causal until the 30th so I don't know all the details.) But the 'how do they make money' thing is what is holding them back.

[miffy23]

I wish my guild would ... I think they have one that they use for just chat (only a causal until the 30th so I don't know all the details.) But the 'how do they make money' thing is what is holding them back.

? Do they think they'll suddenly get charged without agreeing to anything, or something?
We've been using it for a solid year and there are absolutely no signs of it getting a membership fee or anything of the sort anytime soon. If it did, it would be announced and you would be free to switch to a different service well ahead of time, if you so choose.

[Holofernes]

nobody uses mumle her it seems?

[Taeldorian]

My guild still uses TS3 and I dont think we have any plans to switch. We have 3 raid teams though and Im only speaking for mine. Im almost positive each raid team uses TS3 and just goes to there specific channel when its raid time, but not sure if any of them plan on switching.

[threeks]

? Do they think they'll suddenly get charged without agreeing to anything, or something?
We've been using it for a solid year and there are absolutely no signs of it getting a membership fee or anything of the sort anytime soon. If it did, it would be announced and you would be free to switch to a different service well ahead of time, if you so choose.

I don't get it either.

[Adrim]

So first things first. Fear Mongering isn't what I am currently doing. That would be easy type a few lines about how awful Discord/TS/Vent/Mumble/CurseVoice/RaidCall...

Fearmongering was directed at alzoron's comment. "Because I can't understand how Internet business models work, clearly it's a scam!"

As an Officer in a guild there business model does scare me. With a free service you will never know if one day you will wake up with a 404 error saying the website doesn't exist anymore since they simply ran out of money. Now I don't want to switch to a service which has literally no transparency offering a service like this.

First of all, unless you want to point me to a PDF of their prospectus then you have absolutely no idea what their business model is and are talking out your ass. Do you have any idea how many of the pillars of the Internet are unprofitable? Hint: YouTube hasn't made enough to cover its costs since it was founded. Man, what if tomorrow we all wake up and find our YouTube channels gone? We better not use it!

Second of all, even with a PAID service you never know if one day you will wake up and find it gone (Samsung's Milk Music, Nest Revolv, and Disney Infinity for example). That's the beauty of Terms of Service: there are no guarantees. Sometimes even making money isn't enough if you can't grow your market and attract investors.

Hell, how about a couple weeks ago when Blizzard's own authentication servers were down? That pretty well fucked over raiding for my guild, voice or no voice. Shit happens. Only an idiot would put all their eggs in a single basket without having a backup plan.

If members is the name of the game; what's stopping someone buying it tomorrow and suddenly everyone has to pay a monthly subscription or spamming us with adds?

Um, probably because the fastest way to get your entire memberbase to jump ship is to totally change their user experience day one. I don't deny that someone could buy a popular free service and make changes. But it always is frog in boiling water gradual. Not to mention you seem completely ignorant of the entire F2P model which is by far the most likely outcome (where the base product is free and vanity/customization is monetized).

In summary, I stand by my statement that nobody here has any business wringing their hands over what might happen one day in the future. If it works, judge it based on that.

[Heladys]

Discord is good for games with LOTS of out of game information, it really lends itself to things like irc pings and coridinating with lots of channels. but from my experience in raiding a skype group text chat and using teamspeak would be better. I cringe when i hear people say they still use vent.

Wait what? Isn't Teamspeak still the oldest crappiest kid on the block, with Vent at least a little newer/better?

[Tharkkun]

Wait what? Isn't Teamspeak still the oldest crappiest kid on the block, with Vent at least a little newer/better?

Teamspeak was updated to version 3 some time ago. So TS3 and mumble are basically the same with Ventrilo voice quality being the worst. Vent hasn't done a major version update since 2007.

[Zeta333]

Wait what? Isn't Teamspeak still the oldest crappiest kid on the block, with Vent at least a little newer/better?

No? teamspeak 3 shits all over vents quality and features. Right now Vent sounds the worse. Its a night and day difference between talking on vent vs mumble/teamspeak.

- - - Updated - - -

I have most all the differnet VOIPs installed (Vent, TS3, Mumble), I guess I just got old man ears. The difference between them to me, in fairly indistinguishable. I have no idea what "unfit for Purpose GUI" means. I log into to whichever and then minimize it and don't look at it again until I log out, so I'm not sure how ugly applies

But I understand that there are people who log into VOIP before they log into the game and they don't like to play unless they are live chatting with people. Our vent stays mostly empty until raid time and after raid it's empty. So maybe that's why I don't see how still using it is the end of the world.



I don't know that I've had such an experience on any consistent basis. From my experience the people who sound the worse are the ones on dial-up internet talking through the $3 Wal Mart headsets. Maybe in Legion I'll get more of a chance to hop in the different VOIPs and see

No, vent is just worse. the quality between the 2 are night and day different.

[Heladys]

No? teamspeak 3 shits all over vents quality and features. Right now Vent sounds the worse. Its a night and day difference between talking on vent vs mumble/teamspeak.

Wow, thanks for the update. I can't even think the name Teamspeak without remembering the horrible shit quality it used to be. It would have never occurred to me to look at a new release.

[Tziva]

Wait what? Isn't Teamspeak still the oldest crappiest kid on the block, with Vent at least a little newer/better?

No, it was years ago. The latest Teamspeak is quite good. Mumble has a godawful UI and setup but is also low latency and high quality when low latency. Both are solid options.

Ventrilo is probably the worst of the popular options right now, and has been for a couple years.*

*I haven't used RaidCall in awhile. They might be worse.

[Monteverdi]

Yes, made the swap this week and very happy with it. We've been using Ventrilo for damned near a decade, tried every vent-replacement that popped up but never liked on until now.

[ohnoto]

I switched my guild over to Discord in June. So far, everyone has been enjoying it.

[blackblade]

Mumble is also pretty lean on server requirements. I run a mumble server off a 30$ raspberry pi and it works pretty great. (i dunno how great if I had 20+ people on at once, but it's solid with 10)

That being said, getting people set up who are not good at computers and don't understand server/client software is a chore. And said people always seem to have random issues which has me going through their settings and trying to figure out which checkbox to check or uncheck.

edit: wrong quote

[Spotnick]

All I heard from Discord is, it's fine for small groups like 5 man content and social talking, but when it comes to raid, it doesn't work too well and start lagging.

Guess I'll know soon since my alt run plans to use it over Mumble.

But I did use Discord as a global guild chat and it pretty much completely removed the need for forums or facebook groups. For that it's awesome.

[Dug]

My guild will probably continue to use Ventrilo but I wouldn't mind making the switch to Discord since it's what I use now with all my friends outside of WoW.

[Faenlyn]

All I heard from Discord is, it's fine for small groups like 5 man content and social talking, but when it comes to raid, it doesn't work too well and start lagging.

Guess I'll know soon since my alt run plans to use it over Mumble.

But I did use Discord as a global guild chat and it pretty much completely removed the need for forums or facebook groups. For that it's awesome.

This may be a really stupid question but I honestly dont know the answer. But whats wrong with the built in voice chat? Ive been in a handful of dungeon/raid finder groups that used it and it seemed to work absolutely fine..

[porgig]

I made an account just to post this because I have plenty of years experience with all these platforms, here are the differences:

Ventrilo

• Abandonware at this point.
• Voice quality can be improved via. settings but still mediocre.
• Noticeable input delay.
• Volume has to be configured manually per user.
• Proprietary product with paid licensing for hosting your own servers beyond 10 users.
• Griefing exploit discovered many years ago still not fixed to date.
• No encryption.

Teamspeak

• Step up from Ventrilo in terms of features.
• Proprietary product with paid licensing for self hosting. Free for non-profit small use.
• Some limited form of encryption that has to be enabled manually.
• Has had many exploits over the years, including similar griefing exploits to Ventrilo's. Some even more major: the ability for any random user, using the exploit, to give themselves full admin rights on the server. There have been many forms of these exploits over the years, some very recently, but they eventually get fixed since Teamspeak isn't abandonware like Ventrilo.

Mumble

• Many of the same features as Teamspeak. Minus file transfers.
• Open source, completely free to self host without any limits.
• Was getting pretty ugly/dated but there are skins and the ui is new in 1.3.
• Highest audio quality of every application in this post.
• Everything is encrypted by default (cannot be disabled). Authentication using TLS and certificates.

Skype & RaidCall & <insert similar apps here>

• The most cancerous voip apps are grouped together here because they share the same negatives:
• Terrible voice quality.
• Very bulky.
• Privacy nightmare.

Discord

• New app, very active development.
• Has the most features of any voip application listed here.
• Proprietary product with unclear financing model. (despite their claims) Privacy nightmare.
• The new music quality mode on channels makes it about on par with Mumble.

If anyone has anything else to add, please do. These are just my experiences. Pick what you want, if you want to self host it's dirt cheap: use aws, digital ocean, google cloud, etc... very simple guides for all of these just search it.

[Deleted]

I have never even heard of it. In Germany we don't mumble, we don't skype, we don't vent. We teamspeak. Since for ever.... I was sad about that in 2010 when I had my own guild and had do decide to pay double for teamspeak instead of alternative but... they will put all ips into teamspeak client. If it doesn't work your group fails.

[deadman1]

No, it was years ago. The latest Teamspeak is quite good. Mumble has a godawful UI and setup but is also low latency and high quality when low latency. Both are solid options.

Ventrilo is probably the worst of the popular options right now, and has been for a couple years.*

*I haven't used RaidCall in awhile. They might be worse.

My guild used to use mumble, honestly it's terrible, or at least I had awful experience with it. Even vent felt better.