[MUD-Dev] DGN: Effect of voice chat on game design

[Mike Rozak]

Damion Schubert wrote:

> Virtually all of the upper-tier Shadowbane guilds play with
> Teamspeak or some other 3rd party voice program.  Voice chat works
> well for Shadowbane for a number of reasons.  Mostly, we're a
> siege-oriented PvP game, and as such, the need to communicate
> efficiently is enormous.  It's not about making Shadowbane less
> _boring_ in our case, it's about being competitive at all.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that voice-chat was added because of
boring game play. I was linking extensive E-baying and macroing to
signs of boring gameplay.

> If we had time and resources, we'd love to integrate voice chat,
> but without that time and resources, we're happy to point our
> customers to 3rd party solutions.  We're also happy that our
> customers are willing to take the bandwidth costs onto themselves.

Do you think that if you added voice-chat that most Shadowbane
players would use it? How much "better" (aka: more fun) could you
make the voice chat if you integrated it yourself? Would you be able
to charge an extra $5/month (or whatever) to cover the extra
bandwidth?

> The largest argument against is, simply put, the amazing ability
> for players to be as annoying and abrasive as possible.  One of
> the fallouts of our 3rd party reliance is that you will never go
> around town square and hear players chatter randomly - you'll only
> hear people who you've actively let connect to your TS server.
> Some might say this is bad, but I'd argue it works out well.
> You're not likely to hear someone else spout out vile, racist talk
> that we cannot easily filter, store or police

In text, you can a) filter out swearwords, and b) keep a log of all
text spoken. I discovered that filtering swearwords was mostly
useless because people came up with variations, just as filtering
spam-words (like medicine names) from E-mail doesn't work
anymore. The log is handy as evidence though.

In speech, you could keep an N-day log of the speech on HD. An "I'm
being harassed" button press by a player would reference (or copy)
the recent audio recordings. You could even have the player's
computer do speech recognition on it and transmit the transcription,
letting your text filters look for swearwords (SR cannot be gotten
around by using dood-speak). Why would this not work?

By the way, if you do this, put in your license agreement that the
recordings are your property. Maintaining a corpus of recorded
speech with their guestimated transcript (from the speech recognizer
on the player's computer) is a potentially valuable database.

> I've always wanted to make a South Park MMO.  You could modulate
> everyone's voices to be high and squeaky like the kids', and the
> profane environment would be expected and embraced.  Plus, the art
> would be bone cheap...

South Park even comes with an in-context reason for resurrection;
after all, Kenny dies all the time.

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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