Our world of warcraft guild is considering using teamspeak/Ventrilo for raids, we tried the in game voice chat blizzard provides but even with 5 players we couldn’t understand each other.
So we want to get a teamspeak/Ventrilo server, it should be large enough for 25 player(our biggest raid atm).
Are there any dopers with experience using teamspeak/Ventrilo in WoW?
How do you manage it? Is it possible to spread the payment of the server over several guild members?
What is the quality of the sound? Is there difference between the different providers?
Sound quality: Depends on what you’re looking for. I find that Vent is ‘cleaner’, but TS is more true to life. I’d prefer Vent myself–even though things don’t sound as they should, it’s easier to understand people. There are other features I prefer about Vent as well, such as the ability to tweak everyone’s volume individually. That’s really helpful if someone is overly quiet. (On a side note–that’s the biggest issue I’ve found with the in-game client–it’s just really fucking faint unless you turn up your overall sound, which leads to other problems.
As far as how we pay for it–our guild has (or had–can’t get the module to load right now) a ‘donate’ option so that guild members can help out with the cost of the site + TS server. I think one or two of the officers manage paying for them, but this allows anyone to help without making things complicated. The cost of the two together isn’t that high, AFAIK. Vent is the more expensive option though.
I’ve used both, and frankly prefer Ventrilo. TS costs less, though, which is a large reason why some guilds prefer it.
My husband pays for our guild’s webpage and Ventrilo server; he used to be the guild leader and stepped down due to stress, but is still a respected officer.
We find that the sound quality is good; typically any problems are on the user’s end, not setting the mic close enough to their mouth, needing to fiddle with settings, etc.
My advice is to require push-to-talk and (if possible) require headphone use. Push-to-talk avoids problems like extraneous noises transmitting over Vent.* If you have someone who isn’t using headphones on Vent, then you hear their own voice through their own computer’s speakers retransmitting while they’re talking, with a bit of a delay built in (there’s a second or so delay, I can tell by listening to my husband talking in the same room and then his voice coming over my headphones) and that can get obnoxious after a while.
We actually started this because I would swear like a sailor if someone would die while I was healing as my priest. True story. (Oops.)
My guild has a vent server; nobody on Horde-side Shadowsong uses anything else. Members volunteer to pay via a clan-pay system. I haven’t needed to pay yet (we’re paid up for a good long while yet) so I don’t know the specifics, but I gather that it’s a service that allows us to pay by credit card without disclosing our info to guildies.
I don’t know about payment for the server and all that, but I definitely have participated in ops where there are 30-50 people on Teamspeak and it works quite well. This is in Eve and obviously you try to have only the people running the fleet talking.
We have a paypal account for our guild Ventrilo service. We’re a fairly small guild (less than 50 unique members) doing 25-man content. We have a 50-person server with Ventrilo. We like Ventrilo because it allows more functionality as admins and more codecs (important for our Mac people).
We’ve operated on the honor system of “pay what you can” for the past 4 years and have only needed to cover 3 months’ worth of service by ourselves (and may not have had to do that if we’d been more proactive about saying, “Oh yeah, guys, the paypal account is empty” ).
I realize that Paypal is evil. There are server hosts out there with multi-pay options specifically for clan donations. We just don’t use one and none of the provider names come to mind atm… sorry! :smack:
Yes, there is a difference in the service you will receive from different hosts. Some servers are more stable than others. Some have 24-hour tech support. Some have free web hosting for guild websites. Some are cheaper. It’s been my experience that you get what you pay for.
You can even, given a server of your own and reasonable bandwidth, personally host your Vent/TS. Here’s some more info.
My guild is comparable in size, and an honour system sounds like something we could do, how do you set up a guild paypal account? can all players see the amount of money on it ? And one player makes the payments to the Vent server provider?
My husband and I used to do this on a spare home computer, but the problem was at the time that we didn’t have that stable of a home Internet service. The worst incident was going away on vacation for a week and having a disruption happen; since we were away we couldn’t restart the server application and someone else had to create one in the meantime. On the still annoying but not as bad end of things, if our Internet connection “burped” and reset itself while we were home but not online, suddenly we’d get a call from a friend who had our number, asking us to restart it.
My LOTRO group has a vent server. I just pay for it and don’t hassle anyone else for small change. It can accommodate far more people than we really need, and costs maybe $80 per year. I have had excellent service from typefrag.com, and would highly recommend it.
I didn’t know if I could name a business (with which I am not affiliated) as recommended; we use FusionVoice because we need good codecs but not a lot of extras.
They have some quirks about changing payment type so I’d still encourage you to look around. I have friends who like Tyepfrag and a quick Google lists a few others.
For convenience sake, you may want to go with a European server so that you can be assured of quality customer service during your prime time. I can’t advise. =/
Some people consider PayPal evil because… I don’t really understand, to be honest; I’ve never had money go missing nor received junk mail based on my subscription with them.
I do not believe you can make the transaction history transparent, so that other people can see the account status. If you wanted to arrange that, you’d probably have to take a screenshot and post it on your forums. We don’t bother. ^^
We set it up with our guild as the entity (or store owner) and my husband as the account holder. He has the payments to FusionVoice come out automatically.
I’ll be back in a bit if you have any other questions for me. Ferret Herder, the temptation to run one was the same for us, but our bandwidth chokes some times and that’s deuced inconvenient in a raid as it is without the Vent crashing…
Must-have Ventrilo trick to set everyone’s volume equal:
(shamelessly stolen from WoW forums)
Ventrilo Normalization makes everybody’s voice the exact same volume. In essence, you won’t blow your ear’s out or have difficulty hearing people.
Here’s how:
Go to Setup
Enable Direct Sound
Select the SFX Button
Select Compressor and click Add.
Under Compressor Properties use the following settings
Gain = Adjust for how loud you want people to be. (I use 15)
We request that you use headphones, if you have them. If you don’t, while you’re talking we’ll hear your own (slightly delayed) speech as it’s coming through your computer speakers and playing back into the microphone again, and it can get unintelligible quickly if you have the speaker volume cranked.
We don’t require that you can talk over Vent, but you’re still required to at least listen to it on a raid. The only exception we make in the guild is for our one deaf member. Fortunately he’s so awesome at playing a warlock that he doesn’t need a lot of info, and if I happen to be in the same raid, I usually ‘transcribe’ quickly any pre-attack instructions.
Everything Ferret Herder said before, and just a couple more:
Common courtesy applies–no talking over the raid leader, no playing music during a raid without consensus, and if you have to remove your headphones, you need to let the raid leader/assistants know.
Basically stuff that you shouldn’t need to mention, but probably at some point will have to.
What everyone else said. The most important guideline, is listen, especially if you are new. While raiding with an experienced group is not difficult, it does take a little timing and coordination.
We also play with some folks who are not native English speakers, so a little sensitivity can go a long way there, too.
).