5 little-known and rarely used functions of voice chat

Voice chats significantly extended their functionality during the last years but many people use them in the old fashioned way, missing their wide capabilities. Below we will describe the 5 little-known and underrated voice chat capabilities.

So here they are:

The direct talks

Besides group communication, you can also talk to someone directly, not excluding communication in a group. This will be very handy if you need to discuss something with your friend and don’t disturb other team members, while staying in touch with whole team. This can be done using "individual calls" or by assigning hotkeys for communication with particular players.

Hot keys

At the first glance it seems to be a good idea to put a whole team in one group where all members can hear everyone. You have no need to repeat twice the same, everyone is aware of everything. But behind this simplicity hides multitude of problems: total noise in the air, often conflicts, confusion and constant interruption. All these problems can be avoided by dividing team into groups with clearly defined objectives. Communication between groups can be configured by assigning hotkeys. Players may communicate with the entire group as well as with certain people. Beside communication function you can set keyboard shortcuts to the most popular commands and functions to save vital time. Indeed, instead of climbing in the game settings, all can be done just by pressing a couple of keys.

An officer's creation and giving rights

As we know, a creator of a voice server has all possible privileges and features but it is hard to do everything by himself. That’s why many chats allow to create special users (officers) with certain rights and privileges, such as: block, ban, mute other users, create rooms, restrict access to them, create other officers, etc. This is especially useful if you have a large guild and players has different responsibilities or they are divided into different groups which someone has to lead.

Ranks and hierarchy

If every player of the team do what he wants, the result will be only one, chaos. Anyway, players are forced to listen to commands of experienced players and follow to their instructions. To do this process more smooth and make words of guiding players come to others without any interruptions or interference. Voice chats offer to build a hierarchy, based on the user’s rank. So a player with a larger rank will speak with a higher priority and can be interrupted only by a player with even larger rank. In addition to the communication priorities, users may have special rights such as the ability to manage other users, linked to their ranks.

Multiple listening

Splitting of the team into several groups can improve organization but also it leads to the isolation of players within groups. In order to avoid this, voice chats offer a multiple listening. Users in the group are able to listen other groups.

These functions are just several examples of little-known and underrated features of voice chats but there are actually much more. We hope we inspired you to try go deeper in understanding of how voice services can help you in group communication.

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Is voice chat only for "own people"?

We decided to demystify a point of view that voice chat can only be used with close friends or with well-known teammates.

Actually communication in voice chat with strangers isn’t more difficult than communicating in global chats in multiplayer games. Voice communication is much more natural and pleasant than a tedious process of typing on a keyboard. In addition, voice chat does not cancels text chat it is present in almost all voice chats.

For massive raids with a new team members or just with some temporary players - voice chats are simply irreplaceable. To gather players only thing you need is just send them a link to your voice server and then verbally instruct all players at once. You no longer need to repeating same things dozens of times. New players have to download, install the chat and simply connect to your server. Most chats do not require registration each individual player.

Modern voice chats easily allow you to manage large groups of people, you should not worry that if you once invite guests to server they will create problems for you in the future. Guest access to a voice server can be easily controlled and limited.

Voice chats are used by majority of professional teams, and those who play for a long time! So, if you decided to join a team or to create one by yourself, you have to be ready to change your communication for the better.

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Short interview by Vladimir Kuzminov (Virtus.pro) for MyTeamVoice

Vladimir "Maelstorm" Kuzminov commentator of Virtus.pro on Dota 2. 

What problems can arise when you creating (gathering) a team? 

(VK): I can tell you one thing: on this step, any more or less strong team will not face much problems.

How to organize your team during the game?

(VK): It is too late to start organizing your team during the game, it should be done before the game. 

Could voice chat solve the problems of team’s organization during the game?

(VK): Voice chat solves the problem of communication, because it is the most simple and convenient way to communicate. 

Do you advise to use the voice chats?

(VK): I advise everyone to use then because it is so much easier to play and have fun especially in team games.

What are the differences in organization tactics of large teams comparing with smaller ones?

(VK): Large teams more depends on their leader, coordinator. In fact, in large team mostly should talk a leader and others have to listen his information and only sometimes insert short phrases.

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Basic rules for using voice chat

        

We decided to describe basic rules which will help you communicate in voice chat more effectively and comfortably in large and small teams.

1. Assign roles in the team

In the beginning it’s important to understand your role in the team, who you should listen first and who you may ignore. Understanding of your role in the team and a mission in a game will cut most of unnecessary conversations and allow your team to concentrate on the game and avoid chaos. It is very important to assigning a leader and keep to agreed hierarchy.

2. Speak and answer shortly

Brevity is the soul of wit, especially in action-games it may cost you a victory. Dozens of players need to coordinate their actions quickly and accurately, they must be able to get a full picture and build a plan of further actions from the voice communications. So be brief, speak only about important things and this will bring positive results and it will decrease a level of irritation in the team.

3. Keep calm

Relax, it's just a game, especially in cases where they are not needed. Nobody talks about the complete absence of emotion, cause we are playing to get them, but try to respond with restraint. Such behavior will give you respect from other players.

4. Maintain order and listen to the leader

Chaos in the team is a deadlock. You will have no fun, neither winning nor any other positive results. Follow the rules of your team, listen to your leader and then you will get a totally different feel of the game. You must be tough enough if you want maintain an order in your team - ban and mute works fairly effectively.

5. Respect others

In the beginning take care of your microphone, everyone should hear your voice clearly, neither too quiet nor too loud. Turn off the music and make sure that you do not create any extra noise that may disturb or annoy others.

We hope these simple rules will help your team to make communication in better and move forward team results.

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Voice chat: who and how can use it

A Voice Chat - is a tool that can be used by professionals and amateurs, but statistics shows that a voice chat is mostly prefered by the players with experience. It’s the main audience of voice chats. It is quite logical because professionals have an opportunity to evaluate how important voice chat can be for team success. The main reasons that makes voice chats so important for players is a high quality support of a voice communication even for large teams, a high speed of communication within the team and an ability to use team’s rank system.

When beginners start to use a voice chat it let them learn the nuances of the game much easier when they are talking by voice with friends than painfully slowly typing on a keyboard, in the early steps period it is very important. Of course most gamers self-taught but why you need to spend so much time if you can just use a voice chat and join the team and in a few games learn much more that you expect from playing alone.

A voice chat looks like an ordinary chat for communication where there is a place for every team member, a few rooms and simple list of basic parameters. You just need to spend 10-20 minute to understand how to use a typical voice chat even if you have never had any experience with similar programs. By default most voice chats are configured so that you don’t need to change anything in the very beginning.

The most modern voice chats do not require registration for all participants, they can easily be invited to the server: only they need is a password to server and voice chat client application. For more advanced players there are opportunities to put, shortcuts to send messages to specific players and groups, configure the hierarchy, set priorities, listen to other rooms and many other things.

We recommend to have a voice chat to each player of online games, it is as necessary for the gamer as keyboard or mouse :)

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5 reasons why you should try the voice chat!

If you are a natural born gamer and play online games several times a week, you need to know what is a voice chat and why it is necessary for you and all your friends, brothers in spirit.

Today gamers for voice communication prefer to use popular messengers like Skype. However, abilities of such programs significantly more modest than of those which were specially created for group voice communication in games.

So why it's worth to try a specialized voice chat?

First of all – it is specially designed for in-game player communication, not for not important features for gaming such as video chat, integration with social networks etc. Generally, specialized voice chats are very light and use a small fraction of computer memory and processor resources. In the case of network failures will manage a team to stay together and could continue playing. As it is well known, reliable communication not only can save your life, but sometimes provide a winning of the game ;)

Second - easy installation and setup. Just a couple of simple steps to download and install the voice chat on a PC. Configuration of group communication is a matter of minutes and after thеre it saves lots of time, that could be spend on the game.

Third - Voice chats designed for all types and kinds of games, so if you like gaming not only in one game you won’t need to look for a new communication solution and spend time to install and learn it.

Fourth - voice chat will save you for a need to type messages to your friends clarifying some aspects of the game to teammate or expressing emotions and desires, it is much easier to say something and continue gaming having more time to actually engage in battle.

Fifth - professional voice chats are able to show overlay windows inside the game letting you make some tweaks or adjustments during the game. So, if you need to turn off the microphone, adjust a sound level, go to another voice room, you don’t need to switch to desktop application and lose sight of the situation, you have everything under control!

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Voice chat MyTeamVoice significantly updated!

By the requests of our users we added Unicode support (support all major languages) for usernames, room and rank names.

We significantly improved reliability of Client application and Overlay.

More than a half of all made fixes and changes (about 100) are dedicated to Overlay, among them extended list of supported functions (switch rooms inside a game), improved text display and user interface, greatly modified a system that processes hot keys and almost the main one extended support of games which uses DirectX 10 and DirectX 11.

More details about update MyTeamVoice 0.4.0 is available here: http://myteamvoice.com/download

You can always suggest improvements, report bugs or leave a review on our support site: http://feedback.myteamvoice.com/

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