In Development - Guild Banks and Voice Chat - Page 2

Jokie · 05/16/07, 1:58 PM

Mirroring the images as well:

Guild banks image
Voice chat image

Snowcrasher · 05/16/07, 2:01 PM

I wonder if they will add a way to tag an item in the bank for 'pickup' to specific guild members? This would allow assignment of items to players who otherwise wouldn't have permission to withdraw it, yet would also eliminate the need to be there when the banker was or wait on a mail delivery.

I'm curious what % of in-game mails exists simple due to muling (and in particular guild banks).

Originally Posted by Galatea

What I am more curious about is what the ToS implications will be. If someone swears can you report it to a GM? Will they keep a rolling voice chat log like they do with chat logs?

That would require some fairly sophisticated speech recognition software. I suppose unlogged in game communication opens many potential social abuses, so it will be interesting to see how Blizzard mitigates that.

♦ Praetorian · 05/16/07, 2:03 PM

Originally Posted by Kytrarewn

Here's the issue with VOIP and Ventrilo. Blizzard is moving toward raid encounters that are more and more complex and require more "at the very moment" decision making. They also have a hardon against 3rd party software and tools.

So, despite the fact that they enjoy being able to make raid encounters and other encounters that require, or benefit greatly from, Ventrilo, I'm sure there's someone behind the scenes either saying:
1. Are we rewarding the use of 3rd party software and actively penalizing those that don't use it?
or
2. Does our game really require people to pay an extra 20 dollars a month toward a third-party company? We need to get in on that, or, as a show of good faith, give it to them for free.

This post pretty much nails the VoIP issue, I think. It's not supposed to be a Ventrilo replacement. It's a substitute for those who don't have a Vent or TS server. Of course Blizzard isn't going to offer VoIP that's superior to the dedicated solutions that have been refined for years now. That would be silly.

But for a PUG, there is no ready Vent solution. It's not realistic to ask or expect everyone to download Vent, or connect to one player's guild server if he happens to have one. It's up to the community to decide what to do with this tool, but for those who are amenable to voice chat for better coordination in a PUG setting, at least the option is there now.

Also I'd personally welcome it for situations where our Vent server crashes or I'm getting horrible lag to Vent and need to communicate with my raid.

Emila · 05/16/07, 2:04 PM

Originally Posted by Wodin

In-game VOIP has been an utter disaster in EVE, and I see no reason why it's going to be better here. There simply aren't the levels of granularity that people want - there's no way to create private binds to specific subchannels, the "rooms" that you're separated into feel clunky and are annoying to join and leave as the UI support is bad.

The VOIP features of EVE follow the same quality and style of the rest of the EVE interface, which is bascially horrible to the N'th degree. If Blizzard continues it's tradition of making a decent UI to the VOIP layer, plus adds in all the normal UI hooks it normally does, we should expect that the modding community will release a version that is up to par with what people expect from a VOIP interface.

• Zoid · 05/16/07, 2:09 PM

Originally Posted by Wodin

In-game VOIP has been an utter disaster in EVE, and I see no reason why it's going to be better here. There simply aren't the levels of granularity that people want - there's no way to create private binds to specific subchannels, the "rooms" that you're separated into feel clunky and are annoying to join and leave as the UI support is bad.

This is all prejudicial. Until we see the built-in VOIP on the PTR and test it ourselves we have no idea of its quality or UI implementation. Maybe they already have all these features and have an extremely high quality codec.

At the very least, it will have a party and raid talk keys. Honestly, that's all I need. Some features they mention already have stuff beyond Ventrillo--if you ask for Blessing of Freedom on voice chat when we're in the arena, I'll be able to select you since the fact you are talking will show up on your unit frame.

I think its going be a great feature, but let's wait and see for ourselves.

• Galatea · 05/16/07, 2:10 PM

Originally Posted by OzzymandiasKJ

Running either of those codecs at high bitrates would likely tax servers more than Blizzard is comfortable with.

I highly doubt any of the voice chat will run on existing servers. They will probably just handle the negotiation through their text chat backend, and every client open a new connection to a voice chat server. Whether blizzard is installing new servers (or allocating unused servers) in their existing clusters, creating voice only clusters, or outsourcing I can't say. But I am fairly certain no voice data will end up on any server that is running game scripts.

I tend to assume Blizzard's implementation will look more like a carrier grade VoIP reseller type solution (hardware based encoder/decoders on their side) rather than the various Ventrilo licensees who use pure software platform. At Blizzard's scale it makes more sense to use highend vertical hardware than tons of commodity servers*. But I may just be hoping for too much ;-)

*Strictly speaking it may make sense at the scale of some of the larger Vent OEMs, but Vent does not offer them such an option. Blizz can probably find carrier grade hardware that supports any codec commonly used for SIP or IAX2.

springwheat · 05/16/07, 2:15 PM

Originally Posted by OzzymandiasKJ

I'm not saying that this is an unecessary feature. Vocal communication is extremely vital in the deep end of WoW. My point is that I personally prefer the voice quality that you can achieve in Ventrilo and I feel that the implemented VOIP will sound significantly worse for obvious reasons.

You make it sound like its impossible to integrate an existing solution. Vent runs on Mac and Windows, just like WoW. Its been extensively (albeit unofficially) tested by the existing player base so compatibility on the client side is reasonably certain.

Its not without precedent. The company I work for was contracted by Sony years and years ago to develop the voice communication engine for Planetside (I think that was it).

Snowcrasher · 05/16/07, 2:16 PM

Originally Posted by Lorrin

The only rationale that makes sense to me is PuG cooperation, especially if they make it usable in your PuG Arathi Basin group. Everything else is already done perfectly well through Ventrilo, or better done.

It sounds like a lot of effort for not much gain, unless I'm missing something major. There has been a murmur for guild banks for years, but I can't recall the playerbase requesting this addition.

That's a huge motivation for them to do this though. If the bulk of the playerbase is engaged in small guild or PUG 5-mans than this is a great addition. I think this feature just seems bizarre from the perspective of hardcore raiders who have been using a guild supplied vent/TS server for 2+ years.

- Free
- In-game support to see who is talking
- In-game support for party vent while in a raid
- Instantly setup voice communication for PUGs and/or out of guild invites without the need to compromise Guild Vent/TS logins

Cireena · 05/16/07, 2:28 PM

I actualy like this idea. I can have the Blizz VOIP running for runs, and still run my server in the background for me and my friends to BS on, and set my second vent window to the other server I frequent. I mean since I'm already running dual Vnets a third VOIP is not a bad thing, I just need to sort my key bindings a bit better then.

Lord BEEF · 05/16/07, 2:35 PM

Guild banks being able to automatically fund repairs is a very nice feature that I didn't think they'd implement.

I'm sure there will be some fun issues that arise when it's actually implemented though

sovelis41 · 05/16/07, 2:37 PM

Originally Posted by zirky

With the prospect of Heart of Darknesses (what is the proper plural there?).

Hearts of Darkness!

Kalman · 05/16/07, 2:42 PM

Originally Posted by Lord BEEF

Guild banks being able to automatically fund repairs is a very nice feature that I didn't think they'd implement.

I'm sure there will be some fun issues that arise when it's actually implemented though

I hope it's traceable, or there'll be some fun drama coming.

"Hey, who the fuck used up the entire guild bank?"

Merrack · 05/16/07, 2:45 PM

Originally Posted by Kalman

I hope it's traceable, or there'll be some fun drama coming.

"Hey, who the fuck used up the entire guild bank?"

It doesn't specifically mention using the gold, but the "all transactions" part of

Blizzard's website will track all transactions, so should any guild leaders try to scam guildies (by taking a bunch of stuff and transferring, for example), you've got a written record - at which point Blizzard's customer service would take over.

makes me think that it'll be recorded.

This will certainly be interesting to play with on a PTR, but I'm not sure if it'll be enough to move away from normal bank alts yet. I hope so!

• Glayde · 05/16/07, 2:47 PM

Hmm. If guild banks are free, im making my own guild to get a huge extra bank storage area.

Docjowles · 05/16/07, 2:54 PM

Originally Posted by Glayde

Hmm. If guild banks are free, im making my own guild to get a huge extra bank storage area.

I could see them having some mechanism for growing/shrinking bank space along with guild membership. So a newly founded 10-man guild would get 10 slots, and gain 1-2 more with each new member up to some fixed cap. They'd also probably want to base it on the number of unique accounts in the guild, rather than straight number of members, so you couldn't inflate the bank by rolling 50 alts.

Edit: And if guild membership falls below some threshold (say 10), the bank gets deleted and all the items are mailed to the guild master. It's still "exploitable" with enough work, but probably enough to deter most people from getting "lol free bags".