Guild Wars 2

Hi,

This is to address one issue that I’m really not seeing anyone talking about:

Being mute and playing a game.

I heard on WoodenPotatoes raids are designed around the use of Mics. I know people love this idea that there should be Mics and we can all run around instantly responding to this or that. However, what about when we can’t because our voice isn’t that strong or we’re altogether mute?

I went for three years without having a strong enough voice to be heard outside of a whisper and it’s still weak when the weather’s right. This is pretty much game breaking for an MMO player because people just ignore the chat box once they have access to a Mic.

I have no idea what to do about this, but it’s pretty frustrating to be trying to tell the group something in chat only to hear over vent 30 minutes later: “Oh geez, sorry Cookie. We didn’t realize you were talking.” I guess it’s less a problem in Guild Wars 2 since I don’t have to worry about spamming a heal/mana report on a macro, but it ought to be considered that games have worked just fine without vent, teamspeak, and all the rest for years. It’s always been more of a faith-based weirdness people get into the belief they need teamspeak. It’s going to be a lot else if we must use it. And keep in mind, it’s not always clear what’s being saidin these things any more than chat.

I don’t really know why I’m writing this since I don’t have the slightest idea of a solution. Anyway, ya. I don’t really see it being an awesome thing someone is going to design a game with this feature as necessary. It throws out a lot people who can’t. Maybe when the Emotiv headset comes down in price and we can all just think to move our characters then sure. Till then, it’s a pretty unnecessary and vanity-fair to be doing.

Well WP is wrong, nothing is designed around using a Voip, it make everything easier for communications purposes. WvW is easier with Voip, PvP is easier with Voip, Dungeons are easier (ok maybe not in gw2 because they’re a joke) with a Voip, and finally Raids will be easier with a Voip.

Basically everything is easier when using a Voip, less typing is better, but usually so long as you can hear a Mic is not needed (unless you are leading the raid) . Basically if you can hear the commands andwhats going on or what you need to be doing there is little need for EVERYONE to be able to speak, actually having everyone with a Mic can be a problem in itself when the chatter won’t stop.

I think he is jumping to conclusion since Anet never hinted at it in any info or live stream that I know of. Besides Anet knows that any serious raid guilds will use team speak etc for the raids won’t have an issues letting other players use it to for the raids.

Just let the person leading know you have headphones but no mic, or that you have a speech disability, most people won’t care as long as you can hear commands.

Like any disability, you have to learn to work around it. We had a deaf guy in the guild a while back, and it boiled down to making sure we were very clear in our use of the target calling system, and going over “pre-game planning” in text once we worked out a strat.

Your particular disability is a little easier to work around since you can still hear voice chat right? I’d say as long as you don’t attempt to take a leadership role in the content it should probably be fine as long as people know you can’t “speak up” if you need a res or something. What i’d do in this situation is find a volunteer with a less intense role to keep an eye out for you can call out when you’re down, but in practice once you play with people long enough and repeat the same content you sort of develop a sixth sense about keeping track of the group.

I’ve disabled this on my Mumble, but it default reads aloud whatever people type into the Mumble text box. I don’t know if that works in Teamspeak/Ventrilo.

Perhaps you could ask your raiding group to have that function enabled so you can type in things to have text-to-speeched? It won’t be as fast as just saying it, but it may catch attention better than the in-game chat panel. I know that my brain will focus either on audio or on text input but I have real trouble noticing both at once, so yeah, if I’m using a voice chat I’m unlikely to do more than spot check what is being typed. (I have to shut Mumble off when doing RP or I just can’t compose my typed lines if anyone says anything while I’m in the middle of writing, and conversely if I’m reading text in game I won’t make any sense of Mumble chatter so I’ll miss fight instructions while watching NPC comments).

I don’t think ArenaNet intends VOIP to be a requirement, or they would not have removed the VOIP ducking option from the Options panel. (It seems automatic now, when it decides to work.)

Remember, Wooden Potatoes is not the official source of information. Even he tells viewers not to take his work as gospel. It’s just his personal opinion.

Good luck.

Wooden Potatoes is just stating his opinion and claims as such, and his opinions can be pretty weird sometimes anyway – especially lately.

Voice communication will always make the game easier – it’s communication, after all. The fights can be done without it, though.

I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

If it’s intended to be mandatory, all I ask is that they start recording voice logs so that they can ban people who are abusive over that like they do with the chat.