On Fri, 4 Apr 2008, James Cameron wrote:
> In a game, each team would have audio of themselves, perhaps with 3dB of
> impedence added per rank below Admiral.
Having played a lot of clue games with audio I know a thing or two about
its upsides and downsides.
In pregame, it's a great thing. You can chat and catch up on things. It
takes a lot less time for the captain to set up roles, etc.
During the game, you need very strict radio discipline for it to work.
Basically, you only want the captain to speak, maybe also the main carrier
when he's going for a big take. Having more than one or two people during
the game trying to control the team by speaking I have found to be counter
productive.
During the game, there is one situation when voice communication really
helps the team, and that is when ogging ("everyone uncloak in 3,2,1...
NOW"). It's such a joy to see I almost get goose bumps just thinking about
it. Also, if there is not much communication on the voice channel, two
scout oggers can really get that extra edge by communcating to eachother
vocally.
So game wise, voice communication can make a difference if and only if
your team knows how to handle it (ie be very disciplined over the voice
channel).
But I guess it would be a fun thing, and that's always a plus. On pickup,
people could talk smack over the voice interface, chat, etc. Voice
communication in pickup would probably never help anyone's game (unless
the team has eight smart, experienced and disciplined players that know
how to use voice communication in netrek).
So in conclusion, what I wanted to say is I believe that players that play
to win will only find voice communications annoying, while new players
that are looking to have fun and meet new people will love it. Also,
putting decibel restrictions on rank is a bad idea for several reasons,
some of them already pointed out by Karthik.
If you are to add this to the server code, I suggest creating a "captain"
role on pickup and let that guy be the only one allowed to talk. The
players could then vote for a captain (any player on their own team,
including obs, or no player at all (so that no one can talk)) and they
could vote as often as they want to (but of course their vote is only
counted once).
Or, if everyone is allowed to talk (which probably could also be a vote),
no one should have any decibel restrictions. At least not globally, on a
local level each player should be allowed to set private restrictions on
any player (you'd want to mute supervisor, for instance).
--
Niclas