GWJ Horde: Raid Voice Comms
Had a great time on the Scholo run last night. (To Muricen- Nah nah nah boo boo : P ) However, and I have mentioned this in a previous post, it is obvious, and uncomfortably so, that there are people on voice while others are not. I believe it is important to have an agreed upon form of voice communication for any guild raid.
Now I am not saying that everyone needs a headset with mic, and you don't have to participate in the conversation, but everyone needs to hear the decisions being made that relate to the run.
I have no problem with people running another program like skype simultaneously and having their own private conversations, but raid decisions should be heard by everyone. (who's pulling, what's being pulled, who needs a shield, should we roll on that item, oops i aggro'd...get it off me get it off me, arrrgggg!!!, who is afk and so on)
I have heard that Gizmo might be the way to go. How many users does this support and will Skype run simultaneously with it?
Any other suggestions and/or input? Can we come to a consensus?
Why not use TeamSpeak and GWJ's server? Are there bandwidth issues with TS and WoW?
Artesia Druid - Tank/mDPS ~ Cyrana Mage - rDPS
BF2142 "Pod Six is jerks!"
XBL RichRambo
I don't think there are bandwidth issues, but Gizmo has better sound quality once you get past the jungle noises.
"All that time you waste dating and having sex could be better spent scouring the web for new game developer press releases." - Quintin_Stone
Folks usually prefer Skype because it sounds better than all the other ones we've tried, but then some people are not going to be able to join the coversation in a raid. Gizmo is pretty good, but I get bad echo effects every time I use it.
You definitely have a good point, though, Grosh. On the first big pull last night, we almost ended up wiping because people who weren't on Skype accidently broke the sheep and shackle. It's just so much easier to communicate crowd control through voice that you really get used to doing it that way. Next time I guess we should try to get everybody on Gizmo, although we're getting into the territory of "telling other people what to do" again that seems to cause friction...
I've got all of them installed on my machine, so it doesn't really matter to me as long as I can hear what people are saying.
Credulous at best, your desire to believe in angels in the hearts of men.
As long as there is a way to "MUTE" Groshkan, I'm all for Group voice chat. Just soo much simpler communicating to group thru voice vs. typing everything out. Hey, some of still can't Speell all of those big 3 letter werds!
"Violence is the last refuge of a little mind", ah screw it, Me smashy smash!
I vote for Gizmo.
Blackhand Horde:
The Soul(TM) Group: Soulfeeder, Soulagent, Soulhealer, Soulproxy, Soulist, Souldemon, Soulgrok
If I'm in the raid I can easily host a large amount of Gizmo people.. with my FIOS I have plenty of upstream bandwidth available..and I can put the Gizmo client on a seperate box.
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
85's face the truth you're too dumb.
http://www.myspace.com/armyofthepharaohs
Is Gizmo host dependent? I though gizmo and skype did not depend on a particular host to carry the load unlike Teamspeak or Ventrillo. I know in skype the person that hosts the call can leave an the conversation can still continue.
I don't know all that much about the programs though and I may be way off base.
And I do appreciate the offer very much.
Gimzo is hosted on servers by the people who wrote it. Usually pretty decent sound quality. Not quite a clear a syke, but close. Biggest problen with gizmo is those damn sound effects, once someone starts, the channel soon gets flooded with them.
Sykpe is hosted by the person who starts the conference. Very good sound and pretty low bandwidth. Problem is it's still buggy. Ramdom memory holes leads to crashes/system freezes every so often. Main drawback, is the 5 person limit on calls/
Teamspeak - medium sound quality. Is mearly an OK voice chat program. Needs a host.
Ventrilo - Poor to very good sound quality. Needs a host programs to run. Very tweakable. You really need to work with this program to get a good sound quality and even then it is not quite as clear as sykpe.
Main factor in most voice chat quality issues, is the users mic. A cheap mic almost always sounds bad. A good mic almost always sounds good. A mic without headphones usually causes problems, ie echo feedback, ect...
"Violence is the last refuge of a little mind", ah screw it, Me smashy smash!
Version 2.0 of skype just came out. It seems very nice. I have noticed a problem with the program though if you do not minimize it to the system tray while running WOW.
I've used Ventrillo in the past quite often. Often times there would be complaints of echos from different individuals. I read through the FAQ the other day and noticed something new. It has to deal with and issue with Creative Lab sound cards and echos. It would be interesting to know if this is the cause of echos in some of the other voice programs also.
*****
Q: I hear my self echoed when ever a certain person is connected at the same time.
Most likely your friend has a Creative Labs sound card and he is using it for the microphone input. There is nothing wrong with the card but the way the system wide sound mixer controls are configured by default. For some unknown reason Creative defaults the sound input device to mix all input sources into a single source. This includes, mic, sound loopback, midi, wave, etc... They all get mixed together. If you reinstall Creative drivers or update to newer ones then this will quite often revert back to all-in-one mix mode again.
The solution to this problem is quite simple but must be performed by the person who is generating the echo rather then you who hears it.
Have this person go into Ventrilo Setup and select a Mixer for the sound card that will be the sound input device (as determined by the "Input device" option). This will populate the Mux and Line options. Normally there should only be one Mux. It's possible that you might have numerous Line options. Go ahead and select "Microphone" or what ever is appropriate for the input line and then click OK.
That should solve the problem.
Please note that selecting a mixer, mux and line will enable the "Hardware volume" slider. This gives you hardware level control over the sound input signal and is the best way for controlling how loud you are. Setting the slider to half way seems to work best for most people but that will be system and hardware dependant.
*****
Another question here. Can Gizmo and Skype be used simultaneously? If not I would like to go with Teamspeak and Skype or a similar setup. I liked the ability during the MC raids to listen to raid commonds on TS and then have the casual conversations over skype.
I just think 20 people on at a time can get a little overwhelming if discussions other that the mission at had are taking place. If people don't agree with this and that everyone should be on the same comms, that is fine with me.