Can You Hear Me Now?

For those unfamiliar with MMOs*, developers will periodically release updates, or patches, to their games. Changes in these patches range from bugfixes to new content and features, and help to keep the game 'fresh' between expansions (which are major changes and additions to the game), thus maintaining the attention spans of their customer base. Blizzard, like every other game, releases patches fairly frequently for World of Warcraft, the majority of these being bugfixes. Earlier this month, however, the company released patch 2.2, a major patch which adds and tweaks several things -- including a new feature known as Voice Chat.

Why is this important? Since the game's release, players in WoW have been using voice chat as a supplement to text chat for three main reasons: it's easier to speak, it's faster than typing, and it's more social. This utility has traditionally required an external client running alongside the game to use, the most popular client being Ventrilo, a PC-oriented program.

Raph Koster goes over the pros and cons of voice chat of in his blog, commenting on these reasons. While ease and speed are positive aspects of voice chat (barring issues with clarity), the social aspect of voice chat is more ambiguous. The utility can exacerbate existing problems with communication and create new ones. Koster mentions that the "emotional bandwidth" of speech -- its ability to convey more and better emotions, particularly through non-verbal cues inherent in speech, like the tone of your voice -- can be both a blessing and a curse. Speech can clarify meaning where text might be ambiguous, such as when expressing sarcasm. Moreover, the presence of emotions in speech can remind players that they are playing with actual people on the other side of the screen, rather than programmed bits of code. However, voice chat can also strip away a layer of the player's anonymity. The cocky, macho Orc warrior, for instance, could end up being a squeaky twelve-year-old boy. More common, though, are the male players who play female toons**, and have assumed the persona of a female player amongst their in-game friends, where speaking will reveal their true gender.

The anonymity that voice chat strips away is not limited merely to identity. With the presence of voices and more tangible emotions, players must also deal with other players as people. Emotions can complicate and muddle discussions, particularly when they become heated. Voice chat is currently used most often amongst serious players because of its tactical benefits when orchestrating larger encounters, such as those often found in raids.*** Two well-known instances of this are the recordings of two particularly heated moments: the Serious Business (abridged) from the EU Chromaggus server and Getcha from the US Kil'Jaeden server. (warning: excessive profanity, not safe for work). In the first soundclip, the main person talking (the raid leader) is calling out directions to the thirty-nine other people in the group, but as the group progresses in this particular boss fight, the directions become increasingly lost within the string of curse words that the leader keeps shouting toward the rest of the group. In the second clip, several members of a guild**** are approaching the guild leader about an issue, who reacts...badly, to say the least. In both instances, voice chat exacerbates the situation by drawing attention to the high emotional level of the situation.

Now that Blizzard has implemented a version of Voice Chat directly into the game, this opens up several possibilities -- as well as problems. Ventrilo requires both a machine capable of running the program and a remote server for users to connect to, the latter of which either requires some significant system resources or at least ten dollars a month for a cheap server. Now, the built-in voice chat is available to most WoW players, regardless of platform, and will work on most machines, regardless of hardware specification. At the moment, the implemented version is flawed, rendering it mostly unused, but in the future, this may be a viable alternative to Ventrilo. That said, the aforementioned issues will still persist in the in-game version, and perhaps even grow worse with more players starting to use Voice Chat. The loss of anonymity, in particular, will be a problem as players will have fewer excuses to remain silent, though the feature is currently far from universal. The Zen of Design discusses Blizzard's unprecedented decision to include the feature, despite the current issues surrounding it. Regardless, it will be very interesting to see how this might affect later MMOs, even if the WoW version does not end up being used much.


*Short for MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Older games of this genre include Everquest and Final Fantasy XI, both of which are still active.
** Toon refers to the avatar/charater in the game.
***Raids are difficult dungeons, at the time requiring a group of forty players to work together for an extended period of time (often four to six hours at a time, depending on the group). After the Burning Crusade expansion, however, raid size was reduced to twenty-five people, though the time commitment remains the same.
****Guilds are player-run organizations, grouping people together by shared interests or purposes. Some focus on PvE (Player vs. Enemy) combat, usually involving raids, while others focus on PvP (Player vs. Player), roleplaying, or even just socializing. The guild in the Getcha soundclip is a raiding guild, and thus PvE-focused.