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For me, at least, being able to verbally talk to other players in an online game is relatively new. I had done it before with Left 4 Dead on PC, but only with a group of friends. I’ve just started playing MAG, however, and voice chat in this scenario is quite different for me now that I’m playing with a group of complete strangers.
In L4D it makes perfect sense when playing with friends: you know them, you know their quirks, their vocal idiosyncracies, and hearing them in the game increases both the urgency (“I have to save my friend!”) and the fun.
In MAG it’s odd because there’s a lack of familiarity – a real life squad of soldiers *know* each other, but when you’re thrust together like this, comms, more or less, go down, except for the few willing to brave what seems to be futility.
Perhaps that’s slightly exaggerated. Nonetheless, from my experience so far, I have had about three matches out of about 50 where my fellow squad members actively used the voice chat feature for team coordination and information sharing. The rest have been a lot of 14-year-old boys from Leeds (guessing that based on the accent) constantly saying “Medic! I need a medic! Come on, medic – you just ran right by me!” Or, as happened in my first match of today, some guy telling me “Get the fuck out of my way or I’m gonna shoot you!” as I happened to briefly stop, forcing him to go around me.
I recent hit level 15, meaning I now have the option of being a squad leader. This presents a host of interesting possibilities. At the outset I can actively start coordinating the team in a more, uh, “professional” manner: identify who does what and get them to perform the necessary roles rather than letting them guess their way through. However, this also reduces the time I have to perform my own role. Also, as there’s no way to practise beforehand, I’ll have to deal with abuse from the experienced players (because being helpful instead seems to be lost on many of them).
Unfortunately, I think it’s the abusive ones who ruin it for everyone. The whole point of voice chat is to allow people to easily cooperate; it seems to be used for everything except that. I’m aware that this is the case across a lot of different games; it’s not restricted to MAG.
The future of voice chat will lie in making it easy to filter out the abusive and obnoxious types and reward or highlight those who are cooperative. I’ve not seen a game that does this yet, but if you find one, let me know; I’d love to play it.
I'm not sure it's possible without a much more detailed reputation system. This is why we have such formal structures in many games – clans, guilds, corporations – that support people who want to cooperate in order to be more competitive.
Personally, I actually really enjoy the coordinating role in many games; it requires a lot more awareness of the tactical situation and is quite a bit more demanding than performing a single task. Stressful, but can be a lot of fun.
Nice blog – looking forward to reading more!
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Valid point on the “detailed reputation system” comment. Perhaps a future rating system might work for some games, but then I suppose it's something that would get gamed, right? People would start kicking those with low ratings or up-rating one another to improve their ratings.
As for taking on the squad leader roles – maybe I would enjoy it. I'm just afraid of getting a mouthful of abuse from someone with a differing opinion. I really should get over that.
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