0
Regardless, I was giving some thought to what integrated VOIP in MWO would need to look like to be useful and thought I'd post my ideas here for the community to critique or expand upon. Here goes:
VOIP would be exclusively push to talk The reasoning for this should be self-explanatory.
Upon mech death, all VOIP rights are revoked. This is the moment when players are most likely to rage so silencing them pre-empts annoyance for other players. Text chat would be unaffected.
Coms default to the lance level only. The biggest drawback to having integrated VOIP is the potential for trolling. The ability to mute any player should be a given but figuring out who to mute when you have 11 people to monitor is too much to ask given the other demands on one's attention. By putting you in communication with only the people in your immediate lance you only need to monitor 4 (yes 4, coming to that) people and this is easily manageable via the lance info readout we already if we ensure...
Teammate's VOIP status indicated by a single icon next to their name. I'm picturing a simple speaker icon. Lit if teammate has the VOIP enabled, dimmed if disabled, green if speaking. Muted teammates would have a red X through their icon which brings us to our next point.
Muting/Unmuting should only take a single click. With the proper signalling made possible by the icon behavior described in the previous step there is no need for confirmations or submenus. It's easy to determine who is speaking and therefore who does or does not need to be muted.
The above structure allows an immediate improvement in coordination capabilities for each individual lance. Lances can then coordinate with each other via ingame text if they so desire. But how to enable company wide coordination through voicecomms?
VOIP range can increase based on deliberate assumption of responsibility. We already have the mechanics in game that allow players to voluntarily assume lance and/or company command. For players that do so, a new area of the HUD, similar to the lance info portion, would populate with the names and voice icons of the other Lance Commanders and the Company Commander. Commanders would communicate with other commanders via a separate push to talk key dedicated solely to the commander channel.
Company commanders would have the ability to communicate with every player on the team. This too would be a separate keybind. Obviously this ability brings the greatest potential for abuse so it would come with some built in safeguards. 1st, the company commander would appear as a 4th 'lance member' for each player when present and could be manually muted the same as the others. Additionally, if the majority of players (say, 8) mute the Company Commander, the game would remove him from that role and bar him from re-claiming for a period of time (say, 60~90 seconds) allowing it to be claimed by someone else. If no one else stepped up and the original player reclaimed the role, players would get a notification that he had done so, but he would remain muted unless they chose to unmute him.
I believe the above structure would work quite well for integrated voicecoms as it allows players to quickly and easily communicate with those closest to them on the battlefield, does not require anyone to monitor more than 4 potential sources of noise at any 1 time, easily allows for abusers to be silenced, and leaves options for wider communication and coordination open to those willing to shoulder those roles. So thoughts? Suggestions? Entirely better ways to do it? Let's hear them
Edited by Ardney, 28 February 2014 - 07:58 PM.
