Encourage players to use the built-in voice chat.

#1 I'm a big fan of built-in voice chat. Even bought GreenEar before they went belly up and left the community without a means to use the product we paid for.
The new game from Funcom.com called The Secret World is my latest favorite that really could use built-in voice chat due to the game mechanics for groups and raids. Most people turn to TeamSpeak because it's a free install and renting a voice server is cheap.
There are a few reasons I have seen that people will not use voice chat.
1) They roleplay a female character as a guy and don't want to break the illusion as they RP the game.
2) They do not own a Mic and they are not compelled to buy a Mic for the game play.
3) They have slow internet in some countries and any download takes forever
4) They have limited time to play the game and don't want to download in the background since it effects their bandwidth and game response time.
Those are just 4 reasons I've heard from people that simply will not use a voice chat system.

I've often tried to persuade players to use the voice chat so they know how a Raid will be planned out and to keep everyone involved, to know when dynamic changes happen which could mean winning or losing.
Too often, the players that choose not to use Voice Chat are the cause for failure because they cannot hear whats going on.
Sometimes those players are key elements in success and they need to respond quickly with communication. But no matter how fast they can type, it isn't fast enough.
Really, most players could care less if your a hulking 280lb macho man playing a character as a tiny, barely clothed, female swinging a sword as huge as a truck... Players really only care that you know your characters abilities very well and your able to communicate efficiently.

I'd like to see a game with built-in voice chat and without a text based chat system. I can't stand reading L33T speak.

#2 Reward players.

Example: Take two players using built-in voice in an RPG. Have the game keep track of the voice chat from quest start to end. If they used it throughout the entire quest then reward them with bonus experience.

I don't know if this is really a reward, but Halo 4 will pair you with other players using microphones.

#3 SOrry if i wasn't clear, i'm always a big supporter of text chat too for the reasons you presented Scott.

What i ment, is to encourage players to prefer your builtin voice chat over a third party solution.

#4 Maybe add features to the built in voice chat:

1. Lower bandwidth options.
2. Voice changer.
3. Pairing for people who prefer voice chat team members.
4. Demonstrable tactical advantage to using chat.
5. Ask the players why they prefer external solutions?

#5 I like Britt's idea - find a way to track use of the in-game chat (shouldn't be too hard, the game will know when it handles the hot-key at the very least) and award extra experience or some other incentive.

The tricky part is not to penalize people for not using it if they have no way to use it - maybe reward the entire group if anyone uses the in-game chat for group-only missions or something.

#6 Some good ideas there.

I just had another one, if a player is doing a stealth mission, the game could note that he used voice chat near another player before backstabbing him, adding a "boldness" points :)

#7 Especially if you use a system where voice chat is actually emitted in the game environment from the player's location. This would be a fun way to simulate actually being in a place together rather than the normal way chat works.

#8 @Kyrah,
Haha! That would be awesome to sneak up on someone and whisper, "The Reaper has found you...<stab>" It would be very eerie and awesome at the same time. It could make for a really awesome Halloween/Horror game too. I would love to be able to sneak up on people and make the sound of the running/dog zombies right behind someone in Half Life2.

Ooh, what would be cool is to allow people to have hotkeys that play wavefiles that people have in a user customized folder. Then they can play any kind of sound using hotkeys that other players can hear. This could be a lot of fun! Especially for some kind of sneak/horror game. That would make people want to use the chat!

#9 @Frank - reminds me of the chat sound functionality from the old AOL client. Would save bandwidth, too. I suppose it would be nice to be able to share sounds with people you know - perhaps implement some sort of request/accept gui and a peer-to-peer transfer system....

Now that I think about it, the voice chat would probably be better implemented as peer-to-peer as well for a more general chat - but that wouldn't work very well if you wanted positional sounds.

#10 The biggest issue I see with 'enforcing/encouraging' players to use your built in chat, is that it would have to distinguish between casual chat (which is far the most chat ever going on) and game rewarding speech.

#11 @Richard,
I was thinking if you already have a voice chat it would just play a sound that can be heard around your avatar. The ping delays might be an issue though. I guess the first time you play a sound it could transfer the sound to the other players. It could be limited to 8bit mono, and short sample lengths.

@All,
Here is something I am looking into:
cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/
This could be part of the chat system. I am thinking about making a button enable the command recognition. That way if you are using a gamepad you can selectively enable speech recognition to access commands that are not mapped onto the gamepad buttons. It could also allow for a game that does not use any input except voice. Apparently this lib is also small enough (resource consumption wise) to put on mobile devices.

#12 I would not implement a system where a user could not refuse to accept sounds from other players - especially on the internet. A middle ground might be to have a "friend list" like MMO's have and an option to auto-accept files from the people on that list.

With positional real-time streaming sound there will always be lag and bandwidth issues. Even "simple" voice chat systems can use huge amounts of bandwidth. Picking a codec that has high quality and low size is obviously pretty important, and the fact that it's positional sound means that server bandwidth requirements are going to be notably higher than client requirements because the server has to route the sounds to those who could hear them. TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble all have a variety of codecs to choose from but as many know your mileage definitely varies.

#13 @Richard,
Are you thinking like a security risk? You would not download the songs to the other players, it would just send the sounds over the in game chat channel. How is that any different than just talking into a microphone?

#14 The most prominent thing you would want to refuse is coarse language I think. I hate swear words and it definitely turns me off of content with an excess of it and some people spew lots in normal speech.

#15 For speech, sure - but I was thinking you meant essentially sharing sound files (not necessarily songs, but any sound file) so that it would not have to be sent over the network every time. Sort of like tagged strings already in Torque. My reasoning wasn't really security-oriented so much as appropriate-content oriented, and apparently not in the same context that you meant... lol

I don't know if you ever used the AOL client - you could use a chat keyword that would play a sound file on your local machine and on any client that had the sound file while participating in the same chat. People without that sound file would not hear it, and the system didn't support implicit sharing - though you could send files via the chat interface to share with friends.

However, I'd also advocate including the ability to block users' voice chat - just like an ignore list in most MMO's today - if there is the possibility of random people popping into your game.

Man - without swear words I'm not sure I could even hold a conversation....

#16 What The Frank!? Yeah, I would just do a group include type chat for mission oriented play. For MMO an ignore would work. I would figure any good chat system would have ignore anyway.

Although some of the funniest interactions on youtube in games is when experienced players grief the swearing prepubescent noobs that shout orders and insults. I think I saw one of those when this expert player pretended he did not know how to play. The team mate was screaming at him to do stuff. The expert player would stare into a corner and stop moving. Then at the last part of the mission the exp player racked up more kills and points that the noob took the entire mission to accumulate. Then he was screaming even more how the other guy was cheating and there is no way he could have more points. It was a mildly humorous video despite the swearing.