The Next Major Update ?!!

Does anyone ever check the articles related to NCSoft? Chapter 4 aside, there is a major update coming to ALL NCSoft products, Guild Wars Included, which is related directly to the chat system. That’s right! Finally an update on the chat system.

Here is the quote from the interview, READ CAREFULLY:

"…Robert: You have to mention something I love. The V key.
Richard: Oh yeah. One of the hassles of most MMOs is text chat. Everyone is talking to each other by typing.
Robert: Everyone is talking to each other. It’s a detriment to group play.
Richard: You have to have a special key hit to go into mouse look mode. I think a first-person view is best to explore a world. You’re constantly looking around with your mouse and moving with the WASD keys. But that means the keyboard is not available for text chat. So we have fully integrated voice chat through the whole game. People don’t have to worry about having to type.
Robert: It makes such a difference to me. Things go on all around you and you can talk to your team. It really changes the play of the game and it is just integrated.
Q: Are many games doing this well?
Richard: It’s a pretty easy thing to integrate now but I don’t see very many doing it. I’m not sure why it’s not more prevalent.
Q: Are you using your own or Skype?
Richard: The codec is something we’ve licensed but we’re using our own. We fully integrated it with the text chat. We took our voice and text chat system and made it an NCSoft tool. So before Tabula Rasa even launches, you’ll be able to text chat and voice chat across any NCSoft products concurrently. So if your friend is playing Guild Wars, you can send an invite to join you in any future NCSoft releases. It’s like long-distance telephone and an MMO.
Q: You can be in the phone business.
Richard: Exactly…"

Here is the link to the article, although it is about Tabula Rasa.
Interview With Richard and Robert Garriott About Tabula Rasa, Massively Multiplayer Online Games, And Taking On World of Warcraft

It would be great if someone from Anet could actually inform us all if this will take place with Chapter 4 or not...I mean come on, you said every 6 months...HAHAHAHA...Ok I'll shut up now.

Anet has leetsauce oozing from their skin right now.

*remembers back to his days of Counter-Strike and hearing many a 14-year-old's Darth Vader impersonations*

*has a really long shudder*

I'm not sure this is a good idea. Teamspeak and Ventrilo are one thing, being rather exclusive. Anet better include a mute feature or expanded ignore list if they're going to implement this kind of update to the chat system.

Eh they've been talking about this for years - nobody really cares AFAIK. Use vent if you're with friends. To be honest, PVE pugs are the last thing I'd want to talk to.

give us the option to mute as well

Obviously it will not be for general chat. It will most likely be for team speak, guild speak, etc. But the universal chat, between different games kinda scares me. I REALLY do not wish to talk to some Lineage player!!!^^

I know SUN also has integrated voice chat can't think of any others that do off the top of my head though..

Right now, Auto Assault has integerated voice chat, but this one better be better. And I don't want to hear anyone in LA in Trade.

I dunno, i think it'd be funny hearing someone in LA trading.. for about 1 min max before I'd be inclined to hit whatever mute button I can find.

Am I reading it all wrong?
Is this just talking into a microphone and the computer typing out text according to what you are saying?
We wouldn't be hearing their voices, just seeing text in the chat box.

i'm sure there will be options to filter out what you want to hear and such. i mean, people don't see what you're saying in the team channel through typing, it would be stupid to have all of chat and guild and alliance and trade and whatnot to hear what you're saying that was meant to be confidential.

i'm going to assume that there will be different channels (like in the normal text chat) that you could switch to and the option to mute.

..*imagines hearing the swirl of voices in trade...*

You guys are all right and I hope they have a mute block button or something, but I personally love the idea. You see My buddies and I all play on the school server which blocks the ports that would allow us to use TM and VENT. So its kinda of a hassle to drag all our computer to one anothers rooms is were doing a guild battle or TA.

So in my specific case I welcome this change with open arms thanks ANET

The Chinese GW launches its open beta on March 7th, and it did hinted a major update on the same date on the press release.

Use common sense, people. Of course Voice Chat will be limited to groups only...

...but that quote makes no sense. Is NCSoft giving funds to ArenaNet for the massive amount of bandwidth voice chat entails? Sounds messy.

But the fact that THERE WILL BE IN-GAME VOICE CHAT, LIKE VENT, TS, ect. is almost 100%. Should we be excited or not?

Won't change anything. All serious PvE/PvP groups already use TS/Ventrilo. Integrated Voice Chat is much more convient, but nothing to be excited over.

And for non-serious PvE/PvP groups...you will hate that change. Trust me. 2 years of Xbox Live have told me that...

a little late for me to care, i use vent when needed

I think this is a bad idea. they need to invest in more servers before adding something that takes up that much bandwidth. the lagg is going to be incredible.

I am pretty sure that have already thought about the servers...this is professional network people in NCSoft we're talking about. And If I understood properly, there is gonna be a seperate master server just for voice chat accessed by all games from NCSoft.

If that's the case, then I can imagine a subscription fee for this service. We have "plaync" already, it won't be too hard to imagine "plaync+" with some exclusive features like voice-chat server for all games or maybe some other services.