I have to compliment Blizzard on paying attention to the tools the players are using. They've made many changes to the User Interface to integrate those tools into the World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, like the voice chat interface, many of those changes have had bugs and have not been widely accepted by players. As you progress through the levels you will find that you will likely have to download third party programs to facilitate your play.

Ventrilo and Teamspeak are some of the most widely used third party applications used in WoW. These tools facilitate voice chat which is necessary when quickly coordinating activities. In most cases you will find yourself excused from a raid or premade battleground if you do not have the proper tools.

European CM Salthem has posted a Frequently Asked Questions about the new voice chat feature coming in the next patch (which has got to be just around the corner, right?).

There's not much new here, but there is a lot of Blizzard confirming what players have already discovered about the voice chat system. People will be one-click mute-able, and voice chat will be able to be disabled by Parental Controls. Blizzard also makes a few interesting points about bandwidth-- while they say voice chat won't have a big effect on those with high bandwidth connections, they say people who currently experience high latency will likely have bigger problems.

And perhaps most disappointingly, they almost sound apologetic about the quality of the sound. They recommend multi-thread processors (as if that's something someone can really upgrade to without getting a whole new computer), and they acknowledge that third party applications will likely have much better quality.

Not that their voice chat system is bad-- as I've said before (and as we found out in the voice chat survey), lots of players will definitely use it. But third party applications aren't going away anytime soon either.

Yeah, I can't believe it either, but as of August 8th (which was actually a few weeks ago), Guildwatch, just like some realms, has been going down every Tuesday for a year. Well, not quite every Tuesday-- most guilds took a little break from raiding when Burning Crusade dropped, and we took a little break from reporting it. Started up again in February, and have been rolling ever since then.

But I have to say, when I thought up this little slice of guild drama, downed news, and recruiting from around the realms, I had no idea anyone would share my appreciation for news like this. Big thanks to everyone who sent their tips in (to wowguildwatch@gmail.com-- and you can send tips right now for next week's column), and an even bigger thanks to everyone out there who got really angry about something happening in their guild, and decided to do something irrational about it. You're the oil that greases our wheels! Thanks!

Click the link below to see this week's GW.

Every guild's Ventrilo has the one person who talks way too loud (usually a young and/or drunk person) and the one person who talks way too quietly (usually the raid leader, main healer, main tank, or someone else totally vital to the raid.) But luckily for us, Thrux of Darkspear has come up with a handy guide to normalize everyone's voice on Vent:

• 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)
  Attack = 0.01
  Release = Around 500
  Threshold = Around -30
  Ratio = 100
  Pre delay = 4.0
• Done!

Thrux explains exactly what each of the settings does in his post, but I've found that his recommendations work pretty well. I've been using them myself, and Vent is altogether a more pleasant and quiet place. Now if there were only settings to get rid of the "I'm so high" dude ...

We missed it on Friday afternoon, but apparently voice chat is coming in 2.2. Previously, we'd heard that Zul'Aman and guild banks weren't showing up until 2.3, but there wasn't official word on when voice chat was arriving. PTR players have reported seeing a voicechat interface, but of course it hasn't been hooked up to any code yet.

But Hortus now says we'll be seeing voice chat ingame sooner than we thought-- it will be coming soon to a PTR near you, and pending testing, should go live with 2.2. Wow. Blizzard must have done a lot of work on that behind the scenes, assuming that it is what they promise: a fully featured builtin voice chat client. Think it's coincidence that there have been a few sound bugs on the test realms lately?

Which means that at some point we'll have to ask this question: What will happen to Teamspeak and Ventrilo? There's a nice bit of industry there-- players pay for servers all over the place, and while each server is pretty cheap, altogether they add up to a nice chunk of change, I'm sure. My guess is that TS and Vent aren't going anywhere (because players are so used to them, and not just in WoW), but until we see what kind of interface Blizzard has created, we won't know if they're worth leaving or not. Seeing as it's the PTRs, we should get a chance to play with it soon.

Clive Thompson (who I've enjoyed reading for a while now) posted a piece on Wired the other day about how voice changed the way he saw fellow players in World of Warcraft. It's a really interesting read, not least of all because of the two academic studies mentioned: one study found that women were "treated differently" when using voice chat, and another found that gamers made more solid and trusting relationships with friends they knew by voice rather than those that knew by text.

I don't know if Thompson has heard yet that voice is going to be builtin to WoW very soon now, but it's true: voice is about to play a much bigger part in our game. And it's also true that voice changes things a lot-- in my regular guild, I will often jump on our Teamspeak server just to chat with my fellow guildies and friends, even if I'm not in a group. In It came from the Blog (the official WoW Insider guild in which I occasionally can be seen saying crazy things), we haven't set up a Vent server (although it's coming, guys), and so I had the strange experience the other day of running an instance with only text chat to keep me company. Don't get me wrong, I like all the guys in IcftB, but I don't know if the reason I don't know them better is just because I haven't been with the guild as long, or if I just haven't actually heard their voices.

In the end, Thompson marks it down to a generational thing-- some people are willing to share their voices and hear others, he says, and some just aren't. I'm not sure if that's true necessarily (I am pretty conservative on, say, my Myspace page, and pretty free with my Ventrilo joining), but either way, the use of voice chat in videogames has only just started to make itself known.

Coming in 2.2.0: Integrated voice chat.

Tigerclaw, who I've never heard of either-- is he a dev? He says he's "in a whole other building than the CMs"-- has bad news for all of those Teamspeak and Ventrilo hosts. Apparently come 2.2.0, you won't need to run any extra programs, as players will be able to speak to each other via the normal client. Tigerclaw also says a PTR for the patch is upcoming, but he definitely does work for Blizzard: he doesn't give any clues at all as to when this might happen.

So let the rampant speculation begin! Lately I've been playing a lot of the Halo 3 Beta (traitorous, I know), and I love the way voice works in that game: you can push a button to talk over a radio to your whole team, or just speak into the mic without pushing anything, and only players near you ingame will hear what you're saying. I doubt WoW will be that complicated (not to mention that a lot of players don't like that "feature"), but it's a cool effect, and here's hoping Blizzard comes up with some interesting ways to use voicechat onward. What if Hakkar's whispers were heard only in your own personal voice channel?

Upon my now bi-monthly visit to my parents' house, they inquired if I had done anything social with my friends in the last few weeks. "Of course," I replied, "we started raiding Karazhan about a month ago, and defeated the Curator, Aran, and the chess event!" They looked at me strangely, and I immediately realized that I was talking about people I've never met in person and whom I spend time with only in a virtual setting. I began wondering if I was losing touch on reality, that a video game was becoming a real setting for me to socialize. I soon realized that it was not just me, but instead it is becoming a phenomenon that is quickly becoming the norm.

Every day I work with people all over the world by phone and by email, and every night I do the same thing. Some may say that it does resemble more of a work environment than a friendship environment, but I say it can be both. I log into our Ventrilo server and chat it up with everyone who is online. I have my friends, and my not-so-friends, and sometimes we work hard, and sometimes we goof around.

I believe that if you take it to a level that you desire, the WoW realm can be just as much a social environment as a party with friends, a date out with your sweetie, or a business trip. Granted I've never slaughtered the undead in my sales trips, but I'd love to claim a Karazhan raid as a business expense!

What social event do you take along with you into World of Warcraft?

I can't believe, considering my fascination with the great WoW drama that shows up every week in Guildwatch, that this has existed for months without me knowing about it, but I guess it has. There is apparently an entire blog dedicated to nothing but gritty, stupid, complicated WoW drama. How genius.

At GW, we just stick to guild drama, and it's true that most of the really great stuff comes from that. There's nothing better than a WoW is Serious Business guild post or a shocking Vent session (that poor kid is really crying! wow!). These guys have also expanded into PvP drama, and even reviewing some classic stuff. The site is run by two guys named Kingfox (who I believe has commented on this site before) and Eddie Bax, and while they could update a little more often (it seems like they've been too busy raiding lately, what's there is definitely an interesting read.

I don't know what my fascination is with this stuff. I guess maybe it's that I always seem to have no trouble remembering that I'm just playing a game, and so the people who completely forget that just amuse me to no end. I don't want anyone to get hurt (although feelings do often get hurt in good drama), but it just seems like so much of this stuff could be avoided if everybody just lightened up. It's a game, folks-- there'll be other guilds to join and other loot that drops.

I can't remember the first time I was invited on Teamspeak (some people use Ventrilo as well-- I've got both free programs installed on my PC, just in case) for an instance-- for some reason, I'm thinking it wasn't until I got invited to a raid at level 60, but considering the way that things are now, I'm really surprised it wasn't earlier. Maybe it's just because almost every instance I run is with guildies, but TS is basically a requirement for grouping-- a requirement that most of us are happy to comply with, but a requirement nonetheless.

Yakov isn't so compliant-- he says Vent is a crutch, and the fact that every group he enters asks him to "jump on Vent" is rubbing him the wrong way. He says a simple 5 man run doesn't call for using Vent, and that he'd rather listen to his music then his guildies chatting it up on Teamspeak.

I disagree-- not only is it more fun to chat with people on Vent (I tend to know the guildies I've talked to on TS better than the others), but it's just plain helpful, whether the instance is hard or not. If you're disappointed that your guild isn't asking you to come on more instance runs with them, and you haven't downloaded Vent or TS yet, that's probably why.

Of course, like all things, Vent can go horribly wrong. You can be annoyed by your guildies' voices (I'll just say that some people's accents are a little offputting and leave it at that), or like Yakov, you can rather listen to music then random guild gossip. But especially if you're a player just getting to the endgame where there's a lot to learn, jumping on Vent is one of the best things you can do to make sure you know what's going on when. It's not a difficulty thing, although coordinating a pull on TS is much easier than typing strat in the chat channel. It's more of a communication thing-- the more and the faster comm there is, the better you'll all be.

Terranova has a great little piece up about what they say is "the inevitability of voice" in online gaming. Blizzard has talked (ha! I just made that up!) about implementing a voice chat system into the default client, but at this point, they don't really have to-- I don't think I can remember a higher level instance run that I've done in a long time that hasn't been accompanied by a Vent or Teamspeak server with my friends on it.

But the interesting thing about what Nate writes about online voice is that it's more than just being able to react quickly with strategy in a game-- with voice, we're moving ever closer to a deeper connection between our virtual and real identities. Part of the appeal of online gaming, way back in the beginning, was that players were able to keep their virtual identities separate from their real ones-- if you were an accountant during the day, you could hack and slash away at orcs all night, and no one from either world might ever know about the other.

But now, with voice chat, the people you play with get to know more than they ever have about the real you-- first and foremost, your gender, which is why some women still don't bother speaking on Teamspeak. But beyond that, I know much more about my guildies-- their age, their professions, their locations, their situation in life-- than I think I ever would have if I spoke to them only in text. More than ever, as voice chat is commonly and conveniently found in more and more games, it's not just how you play the game-- it's going to be how you sound as you do it.

Ventrilo, Teamspeak, and other voice chat programs can be a great tool for coordinating raids. They can also be a great tool for inappropriate comments to completely wipe an otherwise normal raid. This definitely-not-safe-for-work and possibly-your-sanity Vent recording of an younger kid desperately trying to fit in with the older raiders on a tryout run in Blackwing Lair shows that -- the kid's comments end up distracting the raid so much that the group accidentally pulls Broodlord. (Note: You have been warned about the Vent recording, since it will scar you for life and make you really wonder about the youth of America.)

This has set some people reminiscing about the best comments they've heard on Vent, and the effect it can have on unprepared raids. Back in the day, when I was a noob 60 just beginning to run Scholomance, my guild leader -- who I was utterly terrified of -- laid down while we were recuperating our mana between pulls and started singing songs from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical on Vent. I started singing along, he choked on a cigarette, and we both started laughing. In the ensuing hysteria, which NO ONE else on the run understood, I somehow managed to run directly into two groups of mobs. We wiped and I was not allowed to talk to the guild leader in runs anymore.

Do you have any horrible Ventrilo wipe stories to tell?