Just like home When someone they used to play with logs back on, suddenly a routine night online turns into an impromptu family reunion. So I composed a post on the PC Gaming subreddit looking for any grognards who havent made the switch.īefore long, a user sent a message to my inbox containing a TeamSpeak server and password. Those who remain committed to their rickety VoIP modules are fighting a losing battle, but I still wanted to hear them out. Today Discord hosts nearly 100 million users, and seems to be rapidly building a monopoly in the games industry. When I interviewed Discords CEO Jason Citron last year, he told me how he grew up playing games with his friends on Vent, and specifically wanted to create a service that ensured you never had to remember an IP address ever again. Together this triptych represents the old guard of videogame voice chat, the bulwark standing against the Discord generation, with its sleek design and seamless servers.
There is also Mumble, the barebones hunk of freeware with a Windows 2000 UI and a surprisingly strong cult following. This seems to significantly diverge from the old-school desktop client the software was founded upon.
Is it stubbornness, or nostalgia, or the confidence that the old ways are, somehow, still better I wanted to find out, because those VoIP platforms are still putting up a fight.Īt this summers QuakeCon, Ventrilo gave away 10,000 as part of a long-running Ultimate Power-Up sweepstakes, and later this year TeamSpeak will release TeamSpeak 5, which promises Twitch integration and other new media wrinkles. Imagine I used to copy down programming jargon on a legal pad and connect to a third-party server, just to talk to my friends. You were one step ahead of the internet police, praying that your name wasnt about to be slandered in trade chat.Īustin Cundiff That was the thing about Vent, or Teamspeak, or whatever other VoIP software you preferthose channels felt isolated and sovereign, and naturally that also made them ripe for invasion. I carried out these missions during my peak World of Warcraft raiding days, usually when an insider leaked the IP address of a rival guilds Vent.īut it was also thrilling and felt artificially dangerous in the way that juvenile pranks ought to be. This came in handy if you decided to connect, disconnect, and reconnect to a room in rapid fire succession.
0 kommentar(er)
