Hitting The Mute Button
Posted by 
iTZKooPA on Thursday, February 26, 2009 - 21 Comments Tags: boring raids, military quarter, naxxramas, raiding, raiding without ventrilo, speechless, thaddius, ventrilo
iTZKooPA on Thursday, February 26, 2009 - 21 Comments Tags: boring raids, military quarter, naxxramas, raiding, raiding without ventrilo, speechless, thaddius, ventrilo 
During this week's raid, an odd thing happened. Something that has never happened in my entire MMOG career. The event was shocking enough to leave me speechless. Literally. In the middle of our run through the Military Wing of Naxxramas, the Ventrilo server kicked the bucket. For those of you who may not know, Ventrilo is a popular voice chat application that many players and guilds utilize for communicating while playing WoW, among other games. Once the raid realized that the issue was guild-wide rather than personal, the chiding set in."Looks like someone forgot to pay the bill."
"The economy is so bad that even the Ventrilo hosting companies are laying people off!"
"This guild can't kill Sarth + 3D or even keep their Ventrilo up?! I am outta here," followed by a joke /gquit.
The server went down during the early trash of our second wing of the night. After a slight pause to let the Warlock admin reboot the box, we moved on. We were at pre-Instructor Razuvious trash, so no worries. Who wipes on trash, right? I don't know if it was the distraction, the need to type again or random chance, but we nearly had our first - and what would have been our only - wipe on the second to last pack of Death Knight Cavaliers. The raid pulled out of the lengthy skirmish with a healer standing and a few DPS. Thankfully, things shaped up after that.
Once the initial excitement and near wipes dissipated, an unusual calm set in. Macros were patched together in haste for boss fights, tanking and stun rotations were set way in advance to compensate for the inability to voice our directions (Yes, I know WoW has built-in voice support now, but I don't know a soul who uses it). The adaptations allowed us to continue on for the night, but holy crap was it an entirely different experience.
I and many other guildies never realized how boring a raid would be without the pointless banter. No more mom/girlfriend jokes to distract us during trash. No more lore quips about Thaddius and how he is composed of women and children. And political/religious chat? Who the hell would want to type all of that stuff out? None of my guildies, that's for sure. Normally the GM has trouble shutting people up, but Ventrilo goes down and even text-based conversation drops to a minimum. Damn, I should have done /tumbleweed. I am sure that would have got a few laughs.
Have you ever had to suffer through a Ventrilo-less guild raid? It is one thing to be a part of in a PUG (and usually, you are smarter for not signing on that Vent). But when you aren't conversing with people you know, the game certainly loses some of that social aspect. It was one of those eye opening experiences. You will never realize how much you enjoy Ventrilo until it is randomly absent.
Reader Comments (21)
Mumble ftw
btw first
me and some of my friends use the ingame chat, i think the reason that very few people use it is the chat lag.
My guild uses the WoW voice chat for a while until we got someone with a Vent server. It's honestly not that bad, not that good either....
lol, just thinking of this scenario makes me laugh. I pug alot, so I'm usually just on the listening/laughing side of vent, but when it gets quite I wish I knew some of those ppl better to make a joke or something to get conversation up again, raids are boring when they are quite.
I don't mind the in game chat at all. I'd use it more if others used it more as well.
silence is golden
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what does this mean its on everyones comments and in the begginning of your topic
Vent can either be the most entertaining or most annoying part of raiding - just depends on what kind of group you get if you are PUGing.
@Grant: PL is tinkering with some backend stuff. Sorry for the errors.
I don't use Ventrilo for the banter, I use it so I know what the heck I'm and the others are going to be doing for a boss fight. :P
Yea. I think Vent is great for explaining fights to people in our guild who have never done it. Last night we did H Naxx and we had one guy..for some reason who had never done Heigan..He didn't have vent, and didn't have a mic. So i had to type out the whole fight to him. In the end..let's just say he didn't even get to do the dance. Its so hard to explain fights in type.....After he died..half the raid died on the first dance..so it was 6 of us, and amazingly we downed him with 6 people haha. It was a good laugh in vent.
I have always used the voice chat for WoW and the cool thing is that anyone can make a channel from the chat tab on social pop-up. I had created a channel just for a guild I had, it was alright for the fact that not many people had mics.
is /tumbleweed really an emote!!??
or are you /e -ing it?
btw i use ingame voicechat, but when no one else does it sucks.
oh yeah also does ventrilo cost any cash
This is the major reason I don't play as much as I used to, no chit-chat.
Our guild has a rule to keep pointless banter to a minimum on vent, however, its much nicer to be talked through a fight. I always end up being the newbie healer with a bunch of veterans, and my guilds officers are amazingly patience and kind, talking me through the fight until it makes perfect sense.
Being able to talk on the fly is a big thing too.
"Nebyula, you might want to step back so you dont get hit by the meteor. [Nebyula has died.] Hahaha, d'oh!"
I own my own guild and I'm too cheap to pay for a vent server so we just use typing (and voice chat for the people who have mics) and we do just fine!
lol i dont use any type of v-chat i just copy wat the other ppl are doing and do that dont even type that much maybe and lol here and there
I had problems with my vent until recently where i was one of like 3 people who could never connect to the server.....you think it sucks when there is no vent imagine how bad it is when you know people are talking but you cant hear them
In the Burning Crusade the guild I was in ran all of our raids without Vent, but that didn't stop the trash talking during pulls or anything. We all had Deadly Boss Mods so it's not like we ever had to hear our raid leader yelling at us, we had a program doing it for us.
The guild I am in now though is all about the vent, and I honestly don't know how my old guild ever got coordinated enough to do half the raids we did without voice chat. I don't think I'd be able to do it again.
SKYPE FTW! xD