That's fortunate, not unfortunate.

Yeah, I've been using VoiceOverlay for over a year, works great.

Yes, it definitely changed after TBC came out -- if you remember how the scoreboards looked pre-TBC, it still showed the legacy rank on the left side, whereas now it just shows the class symbol.

I'm still not sure exactly how the mechanics worked, sometimes I'd join and would immediately get leader from whoever had it, other times some rank 9 would still be holding it.

Voiceoverlay still works??

Guild bank: As long as some checks and balances were there otherwise could cause problems.

Built-in voice chat? Cool, as long as it doesn't impact latency in a negative manner. And it needs to be Mac-compatible.

As far as guildbank goes, it's great that it's finally on the way, should have been implemented ages ago.

Built-in- voicecom is a nice idea at first glance, but one also has to bear in mind how "new exciting features" usually work in WoW. It's a good idea, but before it's good enough and updated to provide the same sort of quality and versatility as Ventrilo, most people will have moved on to another game.

Now I guess there really is no excuse for any "guild bank" accounts getting banned - long overdue on Blizzard's part, in my opinion.

I'm a bit torn on the VOIP aspect. Even if the performance is the same as a third-party Ventrilo server, there's still the concerns of private channels, cross-group channels, and all-around better customizability that the third-party programs offer than I don't think Blizzard can or will have the inclination to provide. One example is just the "special effects" under Ventrilo - I think I have a custom volume level set to just about every single one of my guild mates, since no two people's mic volume settings are a like

We run a second vent server open to both sides on the server for use in pugs. pvp or just chatting. Over the time it's been up I can't say it's see massive usage apart from a few retro pugs (naxx ect).

This is due more to being on an EU realm, we have a very wide mix of nationalities. Most are happy to use text communication but hesitate to use voice comms.
In the North American, Korean and Chinese communities I can see an in game voice op working well, in the EU community it might be more of a poisoned chalice that could separate people by nationalities if people demand it’s use in every pug.

But only time will tell.

That would be an unrealistic quantity of data at even a lousy bitrate. Worse, sifting through it would require an massive amount of manpower compared to the results. It's still possible I suppose but honestly, I just can't imagine them logging even the last few minutes of all traffic if this is widely adopted.

I can only assume Blizzard has some culpability answer for the ToS and plans to allow it to self-police to a large degree. The only other answer that comes to mind is a number of /reports resulting in a GM spying for a short period of time and logging that. I'd be happy enough as long as there are mute and/or kick options available, although frankly the odds of me ever using it are slim to none.

Right click the name and set a special effect. Volume is one of the options.

If they have seperate options for the guild bank, i think it will be extremely powerful... ie guildmaster control checkboxes ala the current interface for:

- add items to Guild Bank
- remove items from Guild Bank
- use Guild Bank funds to repair

Having multiple controls will allow you to have "repair off" except for the nights / times the GM decides, not when XYZ players are doing heroic BlahdittyBlah and wiping 5 billion times.

I am very excited for Guild Banks, just hope there is the proper control in place to keep it in check. It elliminates the need for addons and web-interfaces to show bank contents, that is, if all guild members can *see* what is inthe bank, and not add/remove.

those types of permissions seem obvious, and i hope they arent overlooked

I've been using TSO happily for ages, with no problems tabbing out. I think I'm still using quite an old version too, as I get a 'warning this is a beta' popup every time I start it - works fine though, so I've never bothered checking for an update.

I use it all the time. It is still in beta (perpetually), but it works great. I usually run windowed mode maximized. It used to crash if I did something like alt-tab, enable, connect to TS, alt tab to WoW, alt-tab to TSO, exit TSO and TS. Now It doesn't crash at all, but that's probably a directX/video card issue anyway.

Guildbanks are also useable, I guess, as a tool for gold farmers hunting:

- They make a guild and use it: far easier to track once you find a member of the guild, and ban in one fell swoop
- They don't use: far easier to find out who's still using mules instead of the guild bank feature...

Another aspect of VoIP is the resource requirements.

I'm not talking about Blizzard servers' capacity to handle it, but rather, players' systems. As far as current games go, WoW has pretty low hardware requirements.

Having recently *finally* upgrading my system, i can say that running WoW on the old 1900 XP with a crappy nvidia 256mb card, even with 2 gigs of ram, left little room to run Vent on the same computer. I got around this by running vent on my laptop (incidentally, never had to deal with trying to get an overlay program to work).

I just think adding a feature which would require additional system resources will prompt as much whining as it will glee.

At the risk of wondering if you read the very first post, from the screenshot:

"The potential for abuse is obvious, but Blizzard seems to have it covered. Guild leaders will be able to set permission levels - so, for example, guildies of certain ranks can deposit but not withdraw, or only withdraw certain types of items, or only withdraw so many items per day. [...Guilds can use "tabs", which can have similar permission settings on a per-tab basis.]"

This thread is full of people saying, "OMG there needs to be separate permissions and controls and logs," and proving that they didn't read the original post and article.

my intent wasn't for there to solely be permissions, what i meant was that i hope it has an off-hand permission interface that didn't require being at the bank, so you cuold turn things on and off with ease and control.

i did read that article, just glazed over i guess when i got to the second paragraph

Well, the items on the guild bank won't be *on* anyone's account. I think that their policy that you are free to do what you want with items on your own account will remain constant, but that they were unsatisfied with how this policy worked out with regard to Guild Banks.

Once they take Guild Banks off peoples' accounts, they can implement a different policy with regard to banks while retaining their same policy with regard to the freedom to use your own account as you choose.

That was how I took that anyway.

Has anyone actually gotten a hold of the magazine and read the article? I read somewhere that there was like a 13 page article about WoW. I'm curious if there was anything else interesting written in there that hasn't been picked up yet.

I think VOIP is a long overdue feature for WoW but its usefulness depends entirely on its implementation:

-How will it be integrated with the Guild box?
-How hard will it be for the Guild officers to moderate it?
-How hard will it be to setup separate channels?
-How quick will development on it progress?

Among other things.

As needed as VOIP is/was, I think a more important feature would be to completely redo the guild box in general to include more information. Having armory level of detail in game, for instance, would be amazingly useful.

Hijacked this from our guild forums, which was in turn hijacked from somewhere else (not sure where):
- Go to Setup
- Enable Direct Sound
- Select the SFX Button
- Select Compressor and click Add.
- Under Compressor Properties use the following settings
- Gain = Adjust for how loud you want people to be. (I use 6 personally)
- Attack = 0.01
- Release = Around 500
- Threshold = Around -30
- Ratio = 100
- Pre delay = 4.0

Seems to require a disconnect/reconnect from vent to take effect when you set it up initially, but this has been working like a charm for me. No more individually adjusting folks up or down the first time they talk

I think the idea of a guild bank is a great idea. It's actual implementation will make or break it though, much like the LFG system which even after a couple revisions still hasn't taken hold like it should have.

Obviously there hasn't been a lot of information about the system posted on it, but I think there are a couple blatant items missing from the short description:

Guild funded respecs: This happens a lot in our guild and I'm sure it happens fairly often in others.

A real time permission system: Some method that allows a guild leader to tell someone to go pick something up from the guild bank that they wouldn't normally have permission to get. When the player tries to pick the item(s) up they get a warning saying they don't have permission but can request it. Upon request the guild leader/appropriate officers get a pop-up allowing the player to withdraw whatever is needed.

Requiring a trip to the bank and a permission change for one offs will quickly be a painful task.