1. First time setup: Escape->System->Voice chat
The Voice chat setup is new. At the bottom, there is a drop down menu that lets you choose between Push to Talk (PTT) and open mic. You can set your PTT key here or in the keybindings page (see below). If you choose open mic (not recommended unless you're leading a group or raid) you should set your sensitivity using the little Test Mic button:
In your Keybindings->Chat page there are 3 new options:
The Mute self key lets you close your microphone so no one can hear you. The "Deafen" key makes it so you can't hear chat, and chat can't hear you.
the question is...will you still leave your mic open and breathe heavily?
i mean, i know you like to abuse bears, but that's just creepy...
Tell me and I’ll move the threshold up. Of course, Lierra will then tell me I’m clipping the end of my sentences...
2. Using the voice chat:
There are several ways to start up the voice chat. You can only be in one voice chat channel at a time. Down next to your general chat box is an icon for chat channels:
Clicking that button opens a new pane for all your chat channels:
I've clicked on Guild on the left. On the right panel, it shows me the people in the guild, with almost everyone offline. (The open crown next to Adorael's name shows she is an officer and has moderating priviliges for the voice chat channel--i.e., she can throw you off if you are obnoxious.) The yellow arrow points at the new Blizzard icon, it's supposed to remind you of a headset with boom mic. Click on that to join the voice chat for the guild. The other entries (Trivial Hyjal and Testing) are two "communities" that we set up for testing--basically, you can set up a community of your friends list and be able to voice chat with them. Thankfully, voice chat is not available for the trade channel.
This is what it looks like after I clicked on the headset icon. Voice chat is now active, and I have two additional icons. The one that looks like a microphone lets me mute myself, the one that looks like a speaker lets me deafen mysefl. If I right click on my name, I get some sliders for setting my own volume and microphone sensitivity. If you're in chat with other people and right click on their names, you get a slider that adjusts your volume for how you hear them--you can turn up the quiet people and turn down anyone too loud. (Note: if you turn someone up louder, their voice will sound distorted and mechanical.)
Whoever is talking shows up just above the chat box. You'll also notice two new icons added to the left of the chatbox, to mute and deafen.
The Guild and community display is very changed from the old guild display. Now, when you click on "guild and communities" (the red arrow pointing at the menu bar item, inset into the image), you get the big display shown. There are two important tab buttons over to the right for Chat and Roster; the image shows chat. Not only can you join the voice chat from here, it shows you all of the recent guild chat, including what may have been said while you were offline.
If you join a raid, there is a headset icon in the upper right corner of the raid display (Social->Raid). Clicking that joins the raid voice chat. When you leave the raid, you have to manually rejoin guild chat.
Couple of things we learned yesterday when it all went live:
1. Mac users, the PTT key doesn't work. What Aeth did was set his to be Open Mic, and then set up a key to mute himself.
2. The community/guild stuff all had to be disabled to get the servers up last night, so it only looked like this for part of the day. The raid chat still worked, but it meant you had to be in group to talk.
There’s also the bits where you need to have a key bond set up to access the chat channels window if you don’t use the default UI. Anyone using ElvUI for example falls in this category.
Post some screenshots for the ElvUI users. )
Yet another discovery: if your computer has a firewall or other program that prevents the Blizzard voice chat from getting out, you won’t even see the icon of the headset.
That is rather interesting. I wonder if Blizzard is just detecting the existance of access to their voice server, and turning it off? There really ought to be some kind of in-game warning regarding this; but maybe that's how their parental controls work? Who knows.
I'll consider the screenshots; but there's really very, very little I could show off...given that ElvUI shows nothing. :)
Now you can press the key you bound to the chat pane, to get:
Which has much more useful information and channels and such when the system is working properly. :)
Kind of interesting that today's patch apparently is not going well, and they are going to test the communities features on only a handful of realms (not ours).
If by interesting you mean disappointing and concerning, yep. :)
Orionii had some trouble with Voice Chat tonight, which turned out to be a result of privacy settings in Windows 10. Since update 1803, Microsoft added a bunch of settings that lets you turn off Windows' access to your microphone and the like; this will secretly, silently, and completely block ALL applications' access to your mic. Thus, voice chat won't work.
To access these, open your Start Menu, and type "privacy", then click on Privacy Settings:
Then go to "Microphone"
Then, make sure this setting is turned on:
Wouldn't that block Vent/etc also if it were set?
Yes; and it did for me. Didn't matter the game / application.
The new voice chat sux. That is all.
I haven’t gotten to try it, just realized that I missed Inomi’s psa about elvui.
I think it's fine. Sound quality is way better than vent and I can clearly hear the people that I could barely hear on vent. Also, free...
Not saying it doesn't have its issues, just putting out a positive.
i WAS being positive - you should hear what i have to say when i am being negative! LOL
it's messed up all my sound settings, and continues to make me dance with my setting to hear the game...
Today’s patch supposedly fixes the Mac voice client and its use of “some” hot keys, so hopefully our Mac users can try again.
I’m happy to discuss other voice clients, but our current vent service is not a solution. When we had a brief interruption a couple of months ago, it was because it wasn’t paid for (and we hadn’t gotten warning as the time for renewal came up). I put in about half, Dorkina put in the remainder. The service we’re using doesn’t support Vent 4, which would be needed for Macs sometime in the near future.
There are other services, some of which are “free”, but this one comes with the game we are already playing. It is often a problem getting new people onto Vent, I have heard a lot of reasons people can’t install it or make it work. I like the fact that a separate voice client lets us communicate when switching characters or when the game doesn’t work; is that worth the cost of a separate voice client?
In short, not in my opinion. In-game voice, battle.net voice or discord are the best options.
I am partial to Discord, for more than just voice. but that's a larger discussion, and I'm told that there hasn't been interest for a Discord server for Trivial.
I tried Discord and actively dislike it. Sadly, it seems to be what the cool kids are using, proving I'm not cool. )