I haven’t seen groups in the games I play use Teamspeak or Ventrilo in probably 5-10 years. There was a push to Mumble a few years back and it seems like as soon as Discord hit the market it just took over.
Do certain games still lean towards these? Perhaps older MMOs? I’m curious to hear which games are using it.
Teamspeak and mumble are still alive. Definitely not as popular as it used to be, but not dead for sure.
Mumble is still big in eve online afaik, due to some funky auth processes with EVE account.
Teamspeak forums are still pretty active too, and updates are still being released at a regular pace.
I'm still keeping teamspeak as primary voice chat for my small gaming community and i hear from my users that TS3 voice quality is superior to discord. Plus if something happens with server, i can fix issues myself, since i host TS3 server on my hardware. Which is not the case with discord - if you have issues with discord server, your only choice is to wait.
In my experience it displaced Mumble and Teamspeak only for casual gaming. If your group is strict enough about muting/kicking people who refuse to fix their mic settings, Mumble or Teamspeak is generally better -- better quality, local volume adjustments, less resource hungry, open mic not being the default, etc. Think tryhard esport players, or just people with old hardware (probably 90% of CSGO players )).
Yeah, and there's Discord, which also has group chat with history, and a decent interface.
What Team Speak, Mumble, and especially Ventrilo have going for it is that they are more lightweight. However, Ventrilo has a strange latency which cannot be solved (except by moving on). Team Speak, Mumble, and Discord don't suffer from this. Also, Ventrilo cannot be self-hosted (while Team Speak and Mumble can).
Teamspeak is still the best when it comes to chatting when gaming, it is usable with voice activation, push to talk and it has so good echo cancellation that it works when both of us are on speakers.
Though the current version uses almost a full core on my machine, it's still worth it in my opinion and you can find many free servers you can connect to.
To be fair, Mumble is FOSS, and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005. Discord is pretty mediocre software (remember when they accidentally allowed iframe XSS RCE attacks? A very amateurish mistake), but the incumbents were an absolute dumpster fire.
Here's my advice as someone who used to play a number of MMOGs. There are three very important aspects to a voice communication system which vary in importance based on the particular game:
1. Latency and quality. These factors affect whether other players can hear you in time, and whether they can understand what they heard. These are very important for fast-paced situations where you can't afford to repeat yourself, a simple example being arena combat in WoW. Ventrilo is almost always used over Teamspeak for these situations. These sort of high-tension situations rarely have more than ~40 people involved, since once a group reaches a certain size the latency of the entire groups' action becomes higher than the latency of any voice chat.
2. Management. Can you mute people who are causing problems? Can you have a "commander-only" voice system to communicate between a few people in a channel without the others hearing? Can you kick people and ban spies? Is this all easy to do?
3. Scale. While Ventrilo is widely used in WoW, Teamspeak is used in EVE Online almost exclusively. Why? The reason is scale--there are often fleets of 100, 200, 500, or more players and the voice chat system needs to handle at the minimum a broadcast from a single commander to all of them.
Without the appropriate level of effectiveness in these categories, you won't be able to compete with existing apps.
You're talking about casual gaming on public Team Speak / Ventrilo servers.
I'm talking about gaming where the voice chat server is owned or administrated by a clan/group/guild/team (or whatever nomenclature). If you're half serious gaming, you don't use public servers. Their reliability is comparable to Discord, minus the profiling.
It's not really that surprising. At some point the established players ossify and are unable to innovate when the playing field changes.
A new thing comes along without this problem and dominates the new playing field. For Teamspeak and Ventrilo the field changed in that it became possible to host the voice servers themselves, rather than the 'customers' hosting.
My friends and I often use Teamspeak when gaming and general socializing. It's very much like sitting down in a room and being able to talk to everyone.
I wonder if there is a professional market for this? Something like a Slack for audio.
For VOIP I've just been using TeamSpeak3. I'd prefer mumble, but TS3 is more user friendly and running a server on a cheap VPS is simple. No callouts/phone numbers though, pure VOIP, and probably hard to get a customer to join a TS3 server if you try using it professionally.
But imo gaming VOIP is miles ahead of everything else, because gaming has relied on it for a long time.
None of the non-gaming VOIP solutions (I know of) even have voice activation, which drives me crazy.
For text, my friend circle has shifted to just using whatsapp web, again, I'd prefer Signal,or Matrix (or even IRC), but there's the network effect shrugs.
I can live with TS3 and whatsapp over Microsoft Skype any day of the year.
I started using Ventrilo while playing mmorpg's and ended up using it in my business for realtime voice collaboration among team members. More personal and more efficient than IM, it's like a group walkie talkie through your computer. Or a VOIP conference call that's always on.
[ventrilo.com]
Do certain games still lean towards these? Perhaps older MMOs? I’m curious to hear which games are using it.
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