World of Warcraft is implementing integrated Voice Chat soon.

MMO devs have been contemplating the jump to voice for a long time. I realize now it’s been very nearly four years since Richard Bartle wrote his opinions on the subject (hint: they’re titled “Not Yet, You Fools”). Many designers were rather doom and gloom on the subject (including, I might add, myself).

However, since then the market has ignored the designers, with players acquiring and using Voice Chat programs which are typically offered for free. TeamSpeak was in heavy use even when Bartle wrote his article, whereas Ventrilo appears to be the new hotness of the next generation. Older gamers may remember using Roger Wilco and BattleCom. Meanwhile, genres like the FPS shooter genre have eagerly incorporated the feature, MMOs have been reluctant to do so. DDO launched with Voice Chat, and Tabula Rasa has long declared it a centerpiece of their design, but for the most part, MMO designers have been eager to let Ventrilo and TeamSpeak do the heavy lifting.

The ironic thing is that we designers had a long list of complaints about voice chat, which mostly turned out to be invalid. And the people who loved Voice Chat didn’t quite nail why it works so well. Raph has discussed the latter. I’m interested more in the former, because it’s actually instructive from a designer’s perspective – how’d we go so off-track?

Myth: “No one wants to find out the elven hottie in your group is actually a 42-year old truck driver.”
Reality: No one gives a shit.
This has always been the central argument against voice chat in MMOs. It turns out that no one cares – hey, guess what – the guy playing the minotaur isn’t one in real life either.. I play a female undead priest as my main character, and so far my deep voice hasn’t raised so much as an eyebrow. If anything, it’s done the opposite – people now know which hot chicks are actually women. Guess what – this is useful information!

Myth: “It will disrupt roleplaying and/or immersion!”
Reality: No one uses voice chat to roleplay. Heck, precious few people roleplay in these games,e ven on roleplay servers, anyway.
I play on a roleplaying server, and have filled in as a healer on high level dungeon runs. No one role-plays in voice chat.Voice chat is seen as a tactical tool, designed to communicate quickly and efficiently. Roleplaying is left to typed messages, if that. This shouldn’t surprise – after all, would you kick someone out of your tabletop D&D game if they refused to discuss making their saving throw roll in a falsetto voice?

Myth: “Voice chat will be impossible to police!”
Reality: It works right now because it’s consensual.
It turns out that voice chat is easy to police – kick someone from your Ventrilo server. In WoW, they appear to be making it group-based – if you find yourself voice chatting with a hateful idiot, you quit the group.

Myth: “People can’t handle both voice chat and text chat at the same time.
Reality: They do so with ridiculous ease.
Text is still heavily used. It’s used for tells, for group chat, for handmade or class-based channels. It’s used to talk to people not in your group. It’s used in city chat. Text is simply too good at too many things to go away.

But voice chat isn’t all a bed of roses. Seeing Ventrilo and Teamspeak in action, one quickly begins to understand the REAL issues that need to be solved that are preventing VC from expanding beyond high level raiding guilds down to the more casual players.

Actual problem: People are shy. Did you know that 75% of every microphone sold to a WoW player is broken? I say this because, every time I run a pickup group (and I do at least 3 times a week), there is always at least one guy whose mic doesn’t work. It’s always the guy who hit 70 and starting running these endgame dungeons the most recently. And these microphones are apparently self-healing as well – group with him a week later, and you’ll find that he’s gotten it to work no problem. He’s put his toe in the pool, understood the pure utility of Voice, and has since fallen in love with it.

Actual problem: setting up for Voice Chat is a bitch. Installing Ventrilo and connecting to a server is surprisingly easy. Actually getting your mic to work is not. Common problems: people with volume set too high. Or too low. (Actual) broken mics adding noise. People who have too much background noise. Inability to hear chat over game sound. Occasional echo. Difficulty hearing what you sound like or, alternatively, splitting headache from hearing what you DO sound like. Idiots who set up Voice Activation and then turn on a Metallica album. Note: most of these are related more to Microsoft’s sound UI, which doesn’t appear to have recieved any improvements in the last 3 windows iterations. These difficulties are probably why people are reluctant to turn their mikes on – nobody wants to be that guy.

Actual problem: one person can talk at a time. When you get to even small raid sizes of 10 people, you quickly get into a situation where only 3-4 people are talking the whole time. If more people talk, they stomp all over each other, and worse, the raid member loses track of who is doing the talking.

Actual problem: you can only be part of one channel at a time. It’s already difficult enough to understand who is talking without also throwing in the problem of wondering which channel you heard a message from and who else heard it. For the time being, designers should assume a player can be part of one channel at a time. That’s okay, text will remain the preferred way to talk to large groups indefinitely.

Lastly, it’s worth throwing out the real benefits of Voice Chat. Raph’s article mentions a few, including empathy, speed and the true variety that voice offers. The speed one is, of course, why chat ends up winning.Oddly enough, few groups I’ve run with use chat TACTICALLY (i.e. giving information while combat is ongoing) beyond shouting “I’m Silenced!” However, all groups use it STRATEGICALLY — making battle plans before the fight starts. It’s especially useful in high level boss encounters. It’s so much less tedious to SAY ‘Stay at max range, watch for the fire trails, and back off when he starts to spin around” than it is to type it. Especially when you’re killing that critter for the twentieth time.

Voice chat is useful in these situations because there is a negotiation that other party or raid members are waiting on. There’s back and forth. Confirmation that you’re in fact killing ’skull’ is quick and easy in voice. In chat, it must be laborously typed out. If you need to confirm something long, you might not finish typing before someone starts to attack.

Voice chat is not going away. It’s just plain better than text for the tactical squad-based experience, which is right now the kind of game that dominates the MMO marketplace. The real question is whether Blizzard’s integration of the feature will finally be the thing that takes what is currently a relatively hardcore, endgame feature and makes it something that more casual gamers use and appreciate.

Original comments thread is here.