Question Regarding Teamspeak

I'm both unfamiliar with online games and Teamspeak. Can someone explain what teamspeak is?

--Smodo

Teamspeak is a real-time internet voice chat program. Most Guilds use it to communicate quickly while in game. You can check out the Official Team Speak site for lots of other information.

Teamspeak is like ventrilo, its a voice chat program for guilds or teams or clans and the whole nine yards. You can communicate with people, I like ventrilo better but it holds less people in the server, when I join a guild I hope it has a voice chat program.

But other than that I don't thinks its in the game, pretty sure its third party.

Teamspeak is a server you log on to so you can talk via the internet to other players. It is great if you are like me and can't type or spell. You download the client and have somebody in your group create the server. then everbody logs on. You can keep it in a sep. window to adjust the settings while you play. You need a game headset for it to work.

Ren

Ren, I've heard that Teamspeak and Ventrilo are "better" than Roger Wilco. Have you used them all, and if so, what do you think? What's the differences? I've used RW, but not the others.

Don't know I have always used Teamspeak. I am still learning the Ins and Outs of making my own servers but once you make a good one I have not had any problems. You have to use it Consistently or you may have to delete and re-download.

Ren

With teamspeak it makes your voice sound very sketchy. Ventrilo has les spots on the server but I think it has better quality.

With Roger Wilco, I had HEARD that it was band-width intensive, so that if you were to have your own server on your LAN, that even on a cable or DSL connection, you'd experience occassional hangs/drops in both the voice comm and the game you were playing, especially as more computers/players connected. That's what I and my family experienced with our 4-6 computer LAN. I've even used the voice chat feature on MSN Messenger with one other online player outside my network, with limited success. I was just curious if anyone else had had better performance with any of the other voice communication programs available.

Personally I like ventrilo out of all the ones mentioned. Our guild has a 50 person vent server so we never have problems with getting everyone there. Voice quality is the best on vent as well. Though if you are buying the CE of the game i believe you get teamspeak free for sometime so if you have nothing else just use that. Either that or join a guild with something.

I have not used ventrillo but I just downloaded it to check it out and compare. I originally started VOIP on Roger Wilco, but I quickly turned to Teamspeak when I noticed that their program was much more configurable. If you host the server on your own machine you can set overall bandwidth limits, you can also 'choose' which CODEC will be used on said server, you can also have pretty much as many people as your server can handle, average is 100. Once you have a server setup you can create rooms similar to IRC. But more visual. You can set it so that the server itself has a password or just particular channels. You can set it that if someone joins with an unfamiliar login, (unregistered) that person does not have 'speak priviledges' so they cannot hear or say anything without an administrator giving them 'voice'. So far -- teamspeak to me is easy and very configureable. I will check out Ventrillo. and post what I think about it in a few days.

Ventrilo is much better than TeamSpeak, although you have to know what you're doing when hosting a Ventrilo server as it is a little more difficult.

-Virt

Much better in what ways?

I find the client to be much more stable as it takes a very minimalistic approach. Also, Ventrilo's dedicated server has a very small footprint. In addition to that, atleast from the last time I used TeamSpeak, Ventrilo had a lot more options as far as codecs went.

-Virt

The number of available codecs can also vary between servers depending on their settings. I don't really care about which is better. I simply use Teamspeak because it's convenient and a friend has a server for it.

I've never used roger wilco but i've used ventrilo and teamspeak both a good bit. Teamspeak is a much better program imo. It is much more customizable and has a lot more features. But, Ventrilo has better voice quality "out of the box". They are both equal as to voice quality if your using the right codecs, thing is the default teamspeak codec sucks. So a lot of people think ventrilo is better because it has better quality if you don't customize your server. But if you know the ins and outs of Teamspeak it is a far superior program you just need to know a little more to run a good teamspeak server as opposed to a ventrilo server.

Thats what I thought about ventrillo. I know people setup a quick TS server thinking cool I got it up and it is working. But never bother to tweak it by setting a default CODEC. I think its better that Teamspeaks default codec is lower anyway otherwise they would get too many complaints that the program lags their gameplay. Teamspeak server admins also need to set their bandwith limits so that they do not get lagged to death during an influx of network activity. I'll still check out Ventrilo, but I am pretty sure Teamspeak is going to take the cake as far as configurability goes. I love Teamspeaks' web administration.

Is there any cost involved to use TeamSpeak?

As I understand it, no, there isn't as long as you have less than 100 people on your server (convenient for that is the limit on guild size also).

Lansing Kai Don

You can download the server and host it yourself and its free. But if you need a host you have to pay for it. With ventrillo the free server has a max connections of 8.

Um... for all of those who have wrote that the voice quality is better on Vent, please change your TeamSpeak channel/server to something other than default codec. There is no way you can make this remark if you have tried some of the other TS codecs.