Despair thine ears.

Ever walked into a chat channel on hot hours? It is a total catastrophe. Nothing good ever comes from those kind of places, and if you want to speak to someone, you take him to a new channel. You even make one specially for it. Of course, there is always whisper mode, but if

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            * offer A B C D E F without every stating what I want   *

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"hey mike"

"noob"

"hey ted"

"I OFFER 1337 SWORD"

"No youre a noob"

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"noob"

"how's Cassandra? "

"Yo mamma is a wh***"

"noob"

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all fly by in less than a second, your motivation to talk in a channel suddenly degrades to zero, zilch, nada and nothing. You will be forced to constantly scroll through the junk in order to see who you're talking to. There's always squelch, but squelching user 1 through 50 in order to understand user 51 is annoying, right? So you take them to a separate channel. When you are in an instanced game, a spammer who decides to fill the screen with @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ YOU SUCK @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ and who does the same thing for 20 seconds can really ruin your day until you hit the squelch button.

With the rise of broadband internet, ADSL and 1 meg per second transfers, some clever lads tried to outdo the phone company and they came up with Skype and other such systems. Enter the gamer, who up until the mid nineties was forced to communicate by keyboard. Enter a few multiplayer games, teamplayer games, and voila, some clever guy comes up with a teamspeak system so that multiple people can all talk to each other. (yes, I am fully aware that this might have developed in a totally different way. No, I don't care, because the end result is the same.) Teamspeak is great, especially for team and squad-based games like some nice Unreal Tournament, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft or EVE-Online. Whenever there is a multiplayer environment that offers team capabilities, teamspeak will enhance that by providing a more direct way of communication. No more using the keyboard for communication. Great! 

That is, until you meet the equivalent of a spammer on teamspeak, who constantly babbles. Or until one of your team members feels offended with your tone and decides to call you a noob for real instead of per keyboard. Your "commander-in-chief" sounds like Fran Fine from "The Nanny"… with a nasal voice that will curl milk and kill rabbits. Your team-partner is someone who rarely chats using the keyboard, but who does swear profoundly every time someone does something he does not like. Or he likes trance, and you like jazz… and he likes to play it so loud it constantly squeaks through the microphone. Your 2 ^nd in command always says "Yes Sir"  as if he was in the military… and he says it with a LOT of sarcasm because he thinks you stink. That new guy in the team doesn't have a proper headset, so he uses a microphone and his pc speakers, which leads to krzwzzw BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP every time he opens his connection. And last, but certainly not least, precisely at the moment your commander is giving explicit commands (aka yelling "MORE DOTS NOOBS MORE DOTS"), the teamspeak server takes the rest of the day off, your team is suddenly outmaneuvered, outgunned and stuck without a clue, and your mission fails, your characters die, your energy goes to waste and you have to walk to the same point again for twenty boring minutes.

I'm not that sure teamspeak is an improvement over a regular chat channel. I did a lot of teamwork in DII, and if the "team" knows what to do and how to do it, communication is quick and efficient, and it can be done by keyboard just as well as by talking. Yes, for a competition-aimed team it might help, but they already use combat language with short, efficient commands that convey only the most necessary. At any rate, chances are pretty big teamspeak will annoy just as bad as a chat channel, but instead of shutting your eyes, you just have to hope your connection drops, or get earplugs… imagine that… using headphones together with earplugs….

Laters!

//Barry