Kyynele, on 14 April 2014 - 11:33 AM, said:
Seriously, VOIP does not help PUGs much, as everyone will never use it, no matter how you try to enforce it. It is waste of resources exactly because of that, premades are already using their own, and only a portion of PUGs would use it, generating small pseudo-premades within teams that don't play together as well as real premades. Trying to shift company commands to a channel where a major portion if not majority of your team will not be even aware of their existance is even worse than having stuff in the chat that's easy to miss and difficult to write into during the battle.
If it makes you happy to have a couple other lonely random players to talk to each match, it's perfectly fine and I can accept that it's a worthwhile feature for you to have, but the key to actually effective team play in a PUG is the Commo Rose and just generally enhanced HUD in the game.
Simply allowing the company/lance leaders to designate focus targets and bases/cap points by simply pointing at them and clicking a button, so that the objective is clearly displayed on everyone's screen (likely being disregarded by 75% of players still), not as some small arrow on the compass but highlighted as a clear "THIS IS YOUR TARGET" - would already make the gap between premades and PUGs a lot narrower.
Actually when I was originally arguing about VOIP the argument against using 3rd Party VOIP was that most pugs didn't want to have to install a VOIP solution, that most quality MMO FPS's had built in VOIP already, so no one should be required to install a 3rd party solution.
NOT that if it was there the pugs wouldn't use it anyway.
My thoughts are that the PUGs wouldn't have to "talk", but they could take advantage of those that did, and did so constructively towards winning the game by communicating enemy positions. Even if YOU never personally said a word, EVER, in the game, you would benefit by SOMEONE saying, "4 Atlas's behind the hill in C3".
As far as a commo-rose solution, again, it's a piss poor solution for an FPS game where movement and aiming are dependent on the very device you're required to communicate through.
That's part of the reason why the Commander Screen (press 'B') is so under utilized. Having to stop your piloting and aiming to go into a screen where you can't do either to issue a command is horrifically inefficient, especially in the heat of battle.
That plus the inability to scale the icons that pop up on the mini-map, blocking the close in view of mech positions (that whole minimap functionality needs to be expanded, desperately, but admittedly there's too many other game breaking issues that need to be addressed first).
Anyway, VOIP is the most efficient means of communication. Having it would help people act better as a team, as long as, there was a relatively painless means of muting someone (type in /mute [player name], or TAB-click MUTE next to a name, whatever) who was disruptive.
Edited by Dimento Graven, 14 April 2014 - 11:49 AM.