Guild Wars 2

I know this has been suggested before (I just checked in the search bar) but I want to bring it back up because the other topics didn’t have much of a discussion.

I also know that ANet are very busy with their other projects and might not have time to implement this but I believe a built-in guild/party voice chat mechanism would be very helpful. This is how I imagine it would work:

Party:

1. You join a party (or create a party)
2. There will be an icon next to your picture that looks like a headset with a red light on it.
3. If you are the party leader you can click on this icon to create a voice chat for your party, if you joined a party then you could click on this to join a voice chat (if the party leader has created one. If he didnt then you will get a message in the chat saying “Voice chat not created”. The light will turn green showing that you have joined the voice chat.
4. Clicking on the button will kick you out of any guild chat that you were in if you were already in one.
4. When you want to mute people you can right click their picture and click on “Mute Player.”
5. When you kick someone out of the party, they will be automatically kicked out of the voice chat (this will happen first before officially being kicked out of the party).
6. You can click on the voice chat button anytime to leave the chat, and when you leave the party the game will make sure you have left the voice chat first.

Guild:

1. After you joined a guild you can click on the same button (headset with green/red light) to join the guild chat (if the guild leader gives you permission and if you are representing the guild).
2. The Guild Leader or anyone with high enough ranks can choose if the guild chat will be active or inactive. They can also have the ability to right click a player’s name and kick them out of the guild chat (or setup a chat for only certain rank guild members).
3. When you click on the icon and voice chat was not created, you will get a message in the dialog box.
4. You can mute other players by right clicking their name on the guild window and choose “Mute Player”.
5. You can click the voice chat button anytime to leave the chat.
6. If the guild leader kicks a member out while the member is in voice chat the game will make sure to kick the member out of the voice chat first before kicking them out of the guild.

Having a built-in voice chat would be very helpful for many reasons such as:

1. Easy access, no need of having to download and run a 2nd program.
2. Players can talk in voice chat while having their hands free for chatting with other players or for fighting when they are in the middle of combat.
3. If players do not want to use the voice chat they don’t have to, they could still type to the players who are in voice chat.
4. It would help with bringing some social aspect back into the game.

If I have missed anything or I am wrong about anything then please let me know, I just want to people to discuss about this and hopefully be able to convince ANet to add this feature.

I do think voice chat would be good for the following, and ONLY following situations.

(1) Party voice chat. For dungeons and stuff. No need to have Skype, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, and Mumble all installed and set up for the server that the party just happens to be using.

(2) Local voice chat. To add an ambient, conversation style dialogue to the game. Might not work out so well against trolls/spammers but it would be worth testing. Make it so that this option can be disabled if spamming or trolling ever becomes a problem. Also make it so that any player who is transmitting sound has a speaker icon above their player’s heads so you can easily tell the sound source.

(3) WvW squad voice chat with commanders having channel priority. Seperate option to locally disable team and (if team voice is disabled) to disable commander’s voice as well. Doing so would disable the ability to transmit to muted targets.

(4) Ability for a squad leader to /globalmute anyone on his squad who is transmitting offensive messages, too much background noise, etc

(4) NOT map or WvW team voice chats plz since 50 people in a map can lead to a lot of people transmitting background noise, echoes, etc

I didn’t think about WvW, that would be pretty helpful, but idk about local voice chat, and yeah no map voice chat definitely. I only said party and guild because it would be pretty easy to handle voice communications in code of that size.