Blizzard Voice Chat

[Playintrafic]

Its back..................


Seriously blizz? Waisting dev time on this shit, players didn't want it 10 years ago, they don't want it now.

[wing5wong]

Well players do want it - as long as it offers the basics, then less competent players wont need to download, ventrilo,mumble, TS3, and curse, and discord, and whatever else groups demand of them.
If they can make it compete with those, all the better but i wouldnt expect it to

[Dsc]

I remember when they Launched VIOP in about 2007. They severely screwed it up and realms were unusable for a week. I wonder if they learnt anything?

[Boogums]

Oh This is a new idea, surly blizzard will get it right on the first try........

Alpha 1.5 already implies this isn't the first try.

[StationaryHawk]

Its back..................


Seriously blizz? Waisting dev time on this shit, players didn't want it 10 years ago, they don't want it now.

I dunno, I think it's a good idea if pulled off well.

As in, better than their last attempt.

[Mormolyce]

I am mostly looking at the voice system from a WoW standpoint. Might be some bias in that, but lets leave it at that It might be usefull in HoTS, but from my experience with Dota2 its not used too much.

I think WoW has such a devoted long standing playerbase that it's become kind of weird. All the idiosyncrasies of the game have built up over the years to the point that we no longer think about or question them. Having to use a third party utility for voice chat in a game that clearly needs it is pretty silly.

[Mrbleedinggums]

Overwatch voice chat is actually pretty good. If they're implementing that for all games, then it'd be a decent addition. Plus, it's not like it's already made anyways

[Ilfayt]

I actually was hoping they would give it another shot. I get sick of having to juggle different programs to deal with pugs. It's a minor annoyance, but anytime I change mics, I have to figure out what settings to change to fit the one I'm using on each program(no matter what, I for some reason get the extremes of either too loud, too quite, or far to sensitive, on top of constant updates to some of them and juggling passwords and other things.

If they succeed, It'll be a minor 'quality of life' improvement, if not 'oh well'.

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They should have a public voice chat like H1Z1 where you can talk to the people near you. Just imagine the discussions in capital cities.

I'll just make sure to steer around Goldshire Inn more than ever before.

[barackohmama]

If at first you don't succeed, fail and fail again.

What makes you believe this is the same? What made the orginal wow voice chat fail was due to it being ingame and that it was really tedious to create channels etc. This should be more or less like teamspeak or similar voice chat as it's integrated in the battle.net client.

I for one would love this addition. All the guilds i've been in have had problems with voice chats one way or another. When Ts, ventrilo, gamevox etc works it's great, but who hasn't had problems with those? And who really likes typing in new ips every time you're going to play with another group of players?

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It's 2007 again!

Patch 2.2.0

Voice Chat - The new Voice Chat feature is now available in game. Players will need to go into the options menu under Sound & Voice to activate it. Volume sliders are available for the microphone, speakers, and game-audio fade (which automatically lowers the game audio when a voice communication is received), as is a “push-to-talk” setting. Right-clicking on a player’s name now includes the option to mute or unmute that player. Muting another player blocks all voice chat from him or her; the ignore feature now blocks both voice chat and text chat from that player.

Except this is totally different.

[Flurryfang]

I think WoW has such a devoted long standing playerbase that it's become kind of weird. All the idiosyncrasies of the game have built up over the years to the point that we no longer think about or question them. Having to use a third party utility for voice chat in a game that clearly needs it is pretty silly.

Im not in anyway saying, that having the system is a bad thing. I just think that outgame voice chats are always going to be better then whatever Blizzard can put together, especially since they are jungling a few other systems at the same time. In my current TS server, i can mute specific people, i can control sound completly. I have different rooms to move officers and specific members to. I even have priority speak. If blizzard can implement all these things, plus more, i will be very surprised, but i will also use their service. But if they dont provide these things, i dont think it can beat Ventrilo and Teamspeak.

[Dsc]

Im not in anyway saying, that having the system is a bad thing. I just think that outgame voice chats are always going to be better then whatever Blizzard can put together, especially since they are jungling a few other systems at the same time. In my current TS server, i can mute specific people, i can control sound completly. I have different rooms to move officers and specific members to. I even have priority speak. If blizzard can implement all these things, plus more, i will be very surprised, but i will also use their service. But if they dont provide these things, i dont think it can beat Ventrilo and Teamspeak.

with the exception of when Blizz Voice chat fails entire Realms, and login servers become unusable for the entire player base.

[Playintrafic]

I dunno, I think it's a good idea if pulled off well.

As in, better than their last attempt.

Yeah it would have been a good idea way back when. But people are so used to using mumble, vent, teamspeak, etc now why bother?

[Deleted]

I like it. Hope it will become a viable alternative to the popular voice programs.

[Flurryfang]

with the exception of when Blizz Voice chat fails entire Realms, and login servers become unusable for the entire player base.

Yeah, when i think about how many problems blizz have had with stuff like the garrison-phasing, LFD bugs and problems with showing different kinds of groups in LFG, then i know that there is proberly going to be problems with the voice chat. If it is broken for any moderate period of time, it could be completly wasted.

Also, its great to have a system that works, when the does not

[Mormolyce]

Im not in anyway saying, that having the system is a bad thing. I just think that outgame voice chats are always going to be better then whatever Blizzard can put together, especially since they are jungling a few other systems at the same time. In my current TS server, i can mute specific people, i can control sound completly. I have different rooms to move officers and specific members to. I even have priority speak. If blizzard can implement all these things, plus more, i will be very surprised, but i will also use their service. But if they dont provide these things, i dont think it can beat Ventrilo and Teamspeak.

There are certainly some advantages to TS/Mumble/Vent(maybe not that one *cough*)/Discord/etc, but having used Blizzard's voice chat in Overwatch I can say that for me it's pretty rock solid. They may or may not eventually add features like individual muting etc? Certainly once it becomes BNet level there's a lot more they can do with it vs. its current state. But I think people overestimate how much better dedicated VC is over ingame (if done right - not like the "current" WoW VC lol).

The other big advantage is you don't have to expect everyone to install a VC app to join your raid chat. I have six different ones on my PC and I barely ever even raid...

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Yeah, when i think about how many problems blizz have had with stuff like the garrison-phasing, LFD bugs and problems with showing different kinds of groups in LFG, then i know that there is proberly going to be problems with the voice chat. If it is broken for any moderate period of time, it could be completly wasted.

Also, its great to have a system that works, when the does not

Come play Overwatch :P

But seriously, the actual voice chat itself works at least as well as any of the applications I have. Simple to use, volume is good, no real audio quality problems that I notice anyway (not an audiophile). The basic functionality is all there already. They might have more problems with how they implement channels etc when it transitions to BNet, that's the only major problem I can see.

And I guess with WoW's massive playerbase no doubt some setups will have issues with it.

[Nirty999]

Whats the point of this when we have so many voice programs already.. this is just a waste of time and resources

[Twilight Cultist]

Whats the point of this when we have so many voice programs already.. this is just a waste of time and resources

Because it's for battle.net and not just WoW? So, if you are in a random Heroes of the Storm games, you could just say: "Hey, if you are interested, join my Bnet channel". And at the click of a button, you can not communicate through voice chat instead of text. Also, as long as it is good, it would be much more convenient in WoW for pugs. There are just too many different programs that people use (vent, mumble, teamspeak, raidcall, skype). Having a universal voice chat that can be used quickly and easily would be a huge help.

[frijoleslol]

If its the same voicechat they have in overwatch, its amazing. if anyone plays the open beta, use the voice chat. its crisp.

[brainiac2k]

I have the alpha client, the voice chat sounds crystal clear. I was using it over the division with a friend earlier because division's voice quality was just so bad. Better than other voice chat providers that I've used. It looks like its only for the battle.net client right now, but its still alpha so I'd imagine theres more to come.

It is well known that Blizz uses Torrent to deliver files to their customers, I have no issue with that. Because I have software that strictly monitors every outgoing connection attempt, I can see the bnet launcher constantly doing this, even while the game is running. We all have very asymmetric connections, so while most have a pretty much robust down stream, often the up stream is pathetically slow. So I do NOT want this to be eating up my upstream while I'm trying to play the game. Low & behold, there is an option to NOT do this, so I set it that way.

EXCEPT that setting is bogus, the launcher continues to send data to a host of IP addresses. So I went to the forums to see what was up. An MVP acknowledged that this is a KNOWN issue. Fortunately, there IS an option to quit the launcher when the game gets launched so I set it that way. THAT has stopped upstream data transfer that is NOT part of actually playing the game live.

Fast forward to a few days ago. One of our heals was having a considerable issue staying connected... we were working Heroic HFC progression, and he was absent for most of the fights (on and off). Thanks GOODNESS our GM is a mythic geared healer, so she was doing an awful lot of solo healing on progression bosses (upper HFC btw). Anyway, the next day he was working on the issue and somehow seemed to feel it was the launcher... he didn't know there was an option to quit it when the game is launched. BINGO, so far it looks like that issue is put to bed... he's not disconnecting every few mins in raids now that the launcher is NOT running while we raid.

Maybe this chat thing is their way of making sure said evil-launcher is always running? MUCH LATER to that, vent works just fine!

Blizzard hasn't been using torrent for over a year now. Come on, get with the times.

[Pandragon]

Marksmanship is getting their pet back with Lone Wolf as a level 15 talent (and very competitively tuned), so that having a pet is a choice again.

blizzards caving has begun. we all know how this will go. lone wolf will out dps the pet. people will complain and LW will get nerfed so the pets better and not be used anymore. The 2 will never be balanced and even in dps so there is a choice.