BangSmashBoom said:
As an owner of a Turtle Beach Headset PX21, every time I play online, I play with my $100 mic and gaming with other people has never been the same, but ever time I play online with no one but me using a mic, I feel lonely, and unable to strategise.
So... Should gaming online be a mic only zone?
Actually I have the opposite opinion from you. To be honest there is no viable way to ensure everyone in a game has high quality voice chat. What's more getting dozens or hundreds or even thousands of people into a shared channel where only one person can talk at a time is pure chaos.
I've been of the opinion that communications in MMORPGs specifically should be limited to text only, and those caught using voice chat (or strongly suspect of it) should be banned. Largely because voice chat gives a huge advantage when raiding or doing PVP, and there is no way to ensure equal access.
This is coming from someone who has used it (though I have horrible problems trying to keep a mic running).
With smaller scale games, like most FPS games, I suppose it's not that big a deal, but then again I don't play those. Allowing or disallowing voice chat should be an option in the matchmaking though, to ensure either everyone has voice chat, or the guys who don't do not care about it. Likewise it should probably be banned from ranked play.
The needs of millions of people online simply make things like that difficult, especially seeing as real life materials shouldn't have an influance on the games. In the future if we see "moron proof" voice chat intergrated into all PC systems, and then exploited by the game (as opposed to the typical ways of doing things through clients like Ventrilo... which is what I use) things might be differant.
See, to some extent you using your $100 headset and presumably great voice software is similar to someone using a cheat-pad with autofire buttons and programmable macros and such. It's fine when it's just you and three friends or whatever, but when you are playing against the masses of people, it really isn't. I see banning it as being similar to the limitations placed on what kinds of controllers and such people can use for fighting game tournaments.