4Game

For those who haven't listened to the podcast, essentially Jesse and Veritas spoke at length about why adding VoIP would be beneficial to the game and if people were against it, to just disable it. They both brought up their insanely limited experience in the DayZ standalone as the argument for adding it. I've also heard an almost identical argument from Pestily regarding just turning it off etc.

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First off, I'm not completely opposed to it, it does have the potential to create some truly memorable moments. However, in my personal experience VoIP only creates those moments in a very niche community who are immersed enough in the world and lore and willing to RP in that setting.

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I started playing DayZ probably a handful of months after it first came to light. Around the summer of 2012 iirc, and yes for a few months myself and my friends did have the kind of interactions that the guys were describing. Finding other players and talking to them, finding out what they needed, if we could trade for items, teaming up for added protection while raiding the NW airfield etc etc. For those few months the game was fantastic, and completely unique in it's content. Then, around October the game absolutely exploded. Highlights videos appeared all over Youtube, and people from all sorts of competitive shooters suddenly noticed this mod for a niche milsim game. The player numbers skyrocketed, but the community had gone from a majority of RP survival players to the majority trying to land the longest kill they could. The game had changed, and not for the better. VoIP turned into an absolute mess of people just screaming random stuff or calling you a f***ing hacker if you killed them within proximity chat range. If you've ever played a multiplayer shooter on console with public chat on you know what it's like.

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Hence what I mean by BSG missing the boat. Had they implemented VoIP two years ago when the community was still fairly small, it could have led to the interactions that Veritas was imagining. With the popularity this game has found in the last year or so, not gonna happen now. At least in very very rare cases.

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To give an example of why I don't think there's any point, Veritas played out a hypothetical situation where a geared player stumbles up on a low level attempting to place the Delivery from the past folder in Factory. His vision was that perhaps the low level cries out to let them place the folder, and perhaps the geared player would help and cover them, escort them to the extract maybe. I personally cannot see that happening much, in my experience this game has already passed the threshold of KoS. The only time I have stumbled into friendly players is before 8am, on night servers, where everyone goes to just quietly get their quests completed.

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I hope I'm wrong, I really do. I miss those early months of DayZ, running around the shoreline to find fresh spawns to help. I don't think this is the game to scratch that itch though unfortunately.