Thanks Mekhazzio

[Dewman]

I want to take this time to thank Mekhazzio for keeping the chat room open..

I know he has spent a many long night in there with no one around.. For I have seen it..

Thanks Mekhazzio..


Dewman

[Ssnake]

Uh... it's an admin bot, if I remember it correctly.

[Alan323]

Uh... it's an admin bot, if I remember it correctly.

I believe you are speaking of Moya.

[Wahrborg]

Hehe yeah, Mekh even talks once in a while.

[Dewman]

Uh... it's an admin bot, if I remember it correctly.

I believe you are speaking of Moya.


I see it has been a long time since you have been there .. :)

One of these days Moya will rule the world..

[mapman]

Mek is not only real, he is on your credit screen...

[sabot_ready]

Not to mention also that Mek used to post things in the old SB page. He is one bitchin BOT if thats true.
go bot go

[TankHunter]

Why doesnt Mekh play SB anymore? Or at least not in MP.

[Hell_Hound]

I wonder if part of the superior sense of community that we used to have, was because we were all in the same chat room all the time and couldn't beetle off into our private rooms to gossip and slag each other.

It's sad when you see eight people in TS, split among five different channels, and not a game in sight.

I appreciate the effort that everyone put forth to get the TeamSpeak server set up, but if a virus swept over the globe today and annihilated all traces of TS, I'd be a happy guy.

[Sean]

I think thats only part of it. The biggest weakness of TS is that you cant leave and then scroll up to see the rest of the conversation you missed. In IRC, you could easily have several conversations going on at once. You cant do that on TS without going to seperate rooms. It was also nice to see that games were going on because people would change their IRC names to whoever_NGame or something like that. In TS, you just see a bunch of names spewed all across the rooms, who may not respond because A. they are not there B. they are in a game and cant hear you anyway. TS is really nice during the briefing but really has little value during the game, when its near impossible to hear over the engines. People just need to learn to type and risk dying while they are typing their message. :-)

This ends my rant.

[Hell_Hound]

You speak the truth. :)

[Bluewings]

Sean speaks "his" truth .
Mine is different : TS is good .

Cheers . :3starSK:

[ShermansWar]

Myself i find verbal conversation more intimate, capable of revealing more inflection,and much better for fostering relationaships than some impersonal method of typing, which has a slower rate of information trnasfer than speech anyway. ( I can speak faster than i can type, and i can listen to several people at once, but i can only read one line at a time.)

During the recent effort to revive the chat room, i spent a fair amount of time in an empty room, and still visit it a few times a day( noone ie ever there). If people wnated to do it, they woyld have.s far as private conversations, certain people have always held there"Private" chats, either in locked rooms in TS, or by PM in the old chat room. Today certain players dont go into TS and communicate by ICQ or some other means so they can invite select friends to a game of SB, which i think is BS, so people find ways around it one way or another.It's a lot easier to drop down into another room and ask players if they are in a game, ior ask if they want to join, then to go into an empty chat room and wonder "is there noone around today, or are they all in game?"

as far as comms in game, i have severla people including myself who would much rather use voice comms than get killed while typing. The fact is certain players just do their own thing, dont want to be told what to do, and so they have no use for TS. other players like to operate as part of a team and avail themself of the benifits of increased SA that TS can provide.

[Hell_Hound]

...and still others like to operate as part of a team and aren't convinced that TS helps them do that. It wouldn't be appropriate, I don't think, to lump all TS fans into the warm fuzzy team-player category and all non-TS-lovers into the individualist dumbbell category.

The advantage of the PMs, though, was that you could have a PM window tucked into the corner of the screen and still keep track of what's going on in the main channel. In fact, if you can type reasonably fast and enjoy multithreading your social life, you could have two or three PM windows on the go and still keep track of the "main" channel. With voice you get the extremely annoying talkover noise.

So far I haven't found that voice comms confer any significant SA benefit. Do you really find that it improves on the godlike F5 view? I know you can yell "tank, east", but in the same amount of time I can type "map" or "tk e"...

[Sean]

On TS, I cant hear people talking most of the time, so I usually have to move to another unit and turn its engine off to hear, or jump into troops somewhere. Takes much longer than typing.

[Bluewings]

TS ie :
Sherman to BW :"Fred , tank just behind the ridge"
BW to Sherman :"rgr that , I go left"
Sherman to BW :" ok , I take right , we pince him"

34 secs later
Sherman to BW :" right , RIGHT !!"
......BOOOM !
BW to Sherman :"tank is dead , I relocate"

Try that by typing your keyboard :wink: 8)

Cheers . :3starSK:

[Hell_Hound]

Difficult to do with either voice or keyboard. Even there I'm not sure the voice is a significant improvement, especially if you're listening for the enemy tank and someone is screaming irrelevant stuff in your ear.

[sabot_ready]

Each has its pros and cons
With chat nobody can dominate the conversation, it lets anyone have their say.
With TS its more personal as Sherm stated , I can get to know people better .People are not just online players to me but friends.
But it can also start fights faster i think.
In the end thou people will go where the action is and that happens to be TS .

[Homer]

Not everyone can run TS during a game... for us poor 56k'ers, it's not really an option. I know broadband is the norm nowadays but not all of us have it. Ive tried using voice comms before in a game. Like Sean, I couldnt hear what people were saying over the tank and battle noise so in effect it was useless to me. Typing is an art that should not be forgotten.

[ShermansWar]

To me the funniest part, Sean and HH, is that most of us hang out in the lobby, whereas you guys go to seperate rooms, often by yourselves, and frequently they are password protected. If you wanted to talk to other people, or follow whats going on,why not stay in the lobby with everyone else? If it's because you dont like the guys in the lobby, or whats being talked about, whats the difference with Chat?you're still exposed to the same stuff. At least in TS you can go into your own private rooms and ignore us like you do.

The guys I am usually with in TS go to a different channel for game, ar when we have internal unit business to discuss or go over, or for training. TS is invaluable for training. you cant speak as fast, get questioned as fats or have others chime in with their advice, observations and anecdotes by typing, it just destroys the whole flow.

[Hell_Hound]

I usually find the chatter distracting; even though I post a lot around here, I'm not at all conversational by voice.

With chat, you have the option of monitoring as much or as little as you want to (including ignoring everything except "Game Up" messages, if that is your wish) - which can be a good thing.

Personal taste, I guess - I type fairly fast, so it's convenient for me to carry on a text conversation, and I really like that the messages are persistent and don't interfere with each other.

[Bluewings]

IcantypeveryfasttooHell_Hound! :yltype:

Cheers . :3starSK:

[Sean]

Hmm. Not sure what password protected channels you are talking about. I dont see a lot of locked channels, and if they are its usually for a reason.

I do a lot of multitasking, and its a distraction to listen to TS and listen to something else at the same time. I usually solve it by turning the volume down on TS. Other times i'll move to another channel thats not so busy.

Ditto on being able to scan the text chat for game up and several "otw"s as people signed out or changed their names.

[ShermansWar]

I guess it's like HH said, a matter of preference.I talk a lot. some others dont.nothing wrong either way.When LS tried to make a push to use the old chat room more often, i tried to participate and still check in a few times a day, even though i prefer teamspeak, but it didnt last.others thought it might be good for the community, so i tried to go with it, but noone really picked up on it. to my mind, just as well.I do however agree with the idea that segregating the community into small groups suck, i guess i was making the point that those who are complaining about it are the ones who seem to be doing it, to be quite blunt.to be just as blunt, the only channels i see password proteted ever (besides the" stuff" channel, which works on future versions of SB) are the 29th channel, and GuNn channel,occasionally.You multitask, and HH dont like to talk much. those are valid and reasonable considerations, nothing wrong with that.a lot of us socialize on a daily basis and enjoy speaking to each other. As HH said, it's simply a matter of prefernce. I just dont want to see the community broken up into small groups.

[Hell_Hound]

Of course, I've also spent more than a few hours sitting in the "Looking for a Game" channel. Alone. :(

In the good old days, it was assumed that everybody in the chat room was looking for a game, which can only have helped the game frequency. I should make a serious effort to get into chat more often...

[ShermansWar]

I bet of you were in the lobby, youd get into twice as many games, and with you there, games would start twice as fast.I have seen you down there many a night, as you say.If by " making a serious effort to get into chat more often" you mean getting into the old chat room, the only one i ever see there is me,m and i doubt there have been any games started there in quite some time..If you mean getting into conversation with the rest of us, i think the byproduct would be a lot more games played. a lot faster a lot more often.Most of the times there are 5 guys in the room, 2 who are busy and 3 who wanna play and need a fourth player.I myself would like to play with you more often.

[DrDevice]

As far as making TS audible above engine noise, you simply have to adjust the TS output levels in the options screen. You can make the voices clear enough that you can have normal volume for SB and TS without blaring the speakers.

This certainly doesn't overcome the talk-over, the loud mic or the overly-sensitive-voice activation, though.

I am all for voice comm if it's respectful, well managed and helps. I hate it when it distracts from the game. It certainly helps in planning, but isn't a huge advantage in game unless the players use good radio discipline. And that is reeeeeally hard to come by.

As far as the channel hopping/looking for a game problem, players need to abide by the room names, respect when others aren't hanging around in the lobby or pre-game and it should work fine. It just doesn't seem to work too well in practice. If you want a game - go to the "waiting" room. If you just want to shoot the breeze - stay in the lobby or your team room. This seems pretty straightforward.

I don't think the drop off in games is a function of TS. The game and community are aging. Many players just don't seem to show up any more for one reason or another. It's a natural evolution of gaming in my experience.

HH - you said "in the good old days." I've heard a lot of "back in MY day" talk lately. I think that, if anything, is the biggest indicator of the state of the community - whether it's here on the forum, on chat or on TS.

[Hector]

i want to take advantage of this thread to apolgyze if I have ever not answered to someone talking to me. I dont precisely have the best ears and also my comprehension of spoken languages leaves much to be desired. I also have the very bad habit of loosing north, and sometimes i call east to west and west to east :oops: and actually drive in the wrong direction. Out of that, remember, if i have a spare tank, i give it if someone needs it. Also, the phrases i usually never understand, not even in spanish are: "can i borrow some money?", "Héctor: how old are you?", "Hector, why did you loose those tanks?" :mrgreen:
No, seriously, sorry for any misunderstanding or or apparent lack of attention.

Hector

[Hell_Hound]

I was mostly being ironic with the deliberate use of "good old days" - please don't lump me in with the bitter-old-codger crowd just yet. :)

[DrDevice]

Not out to pasture yet, eh?

Fair enough. :wink:

[sabot_ready]

north = norte = nord = norr
south = sur = midi, sud = söder, sydlig
east = este = est, orient = öster,ost
west = poniente, oeste =couchant, ouest = väster
Hey Hector we have room to be multi lingual tankers

In the early day there seems to be more people on chat than TS.

[Lone*star49]

Why doesnt Mekh play SB anymore? Or at least not in MP.
...

Mekh is from the old SB school, TC'ing and using platoons.. When it went public, he kinda just faded away from online MP, and let the new breed of players have it..

Chat is still very useful in the mornings, USA time, in that, many Euro's have a hard time understanding TS, as opposed to the written English..

Also, chat has always been a hit or miss type forum.. but one thing is for sure, MOST than come into chat are looking for battle.. (good kind..lol)

And, for those that like to type, or look for ways to get better and faster with typing, Chat is the place, like in Online MP, typing short meanings is great, in that, one never gets stepped over by 2 or more reporting at the same time..

All a matter of opinion and prefrence, as I see both chat, and TS, along with radio type, and TS for gaming with, and without, advantages..


LS

[ShotMagnet]

...Sean and HH...most of us hang out in the lobby, whereas you guys go to seperate rooms, often by yourselves, and frequently they are password protected. If you wanted to talk to other people, or follow whats going on,why not stay in the lobby with everyone else? If it's because you dont like the guys in the lobby, or whats being talked about, whats the difference with Chat?you're still exposed to the same stuff. At least in TS you can go into your own private rooms and ignore us like you do.

It's still much easier to go to another channel in TS and wait for an individual while you're working on something else. That happens to me a lot. It's also easier for the folks in the lobby to determine who's here for what, if someone shows up then hops to another channel.

Often I'm either working on a mission, or something for the AFK, or the SBSDG, or Dark Angel or Bluewings, etc. Often I'm waiting for HH, Sean, BW, DA, etc to show up so I can talk to them about that thing. It works better all the way around to put myself in the channel I want to be in from the start. Everyone knows what I'm here for, no one has to ask me if I want in on a game (because I've excused myself to another channel), I can still participate in a conversation if I find the wish, and I can do that with a minimum of interruption to what I'm typing.

...the only channels i see password proteted ever (besides the" stuff" channel, which works on future versions of SB) are the 29th channel, and GuNn channel,occasionally.You multitask, and HH dont like to talk much. those are valid and reasonable considerations, nothing wrong with that.a lot of us socialize on a daily basis and enjoy speaking to each other. As HH said, it's simply a matter of prefernce. I just dont want to see the community broken up into small groups.

There are other reasons as well, such as trying out new scenario concepts that may not be interruption-tolerant. The 29th does that from time to time, when we do we PW the channel not so as to be exclusionist, but so we can give the new thing a decent workout in a clinical environment before it's released publicly. Note that at no point are we being exclusionist. Mapman has joined us a couple of times, so have Sean, Hector, LS, TH, etc. Note also that a lot of the 29th is involved in FG, that they hold practices, and that FG Blue is not PW-protected. I'd not like to hold a practice in a channel where anyone can stick one's head in at any time, without my knowledge.

TS has been with us for more than a year, three new VUs have come and/or gone since. A lot of new members have come, and stayed since. The community doesn't seem to be fragmenting more than one expects, considering the existence of VUs and consequences entailing.

Shot

[YdnarB]

I have noticed, as others have, that during a game with TS, there is actually very little said. Either it's the tank noise, or distraction or whatever, there really isn't a bunch of chatter. Couple weeks ago I was in TGIF, a group of us had the South and we had quite a bit of talk. Unusual, in my experience. Mostly laughing at each other and it was a hoot. But it has been an exception for me.

One condition that really gets the chat going is doing the scenario without using the map. This is an idea HH came up with and we've done a number in the 29th. He calls them Paper Tigers. Without the God Map available (aka F5) you really have to communicate and pass meaningful knowledge and discuss the situation. If I could disable the map in a scenario or have it not update it would be awesome. You can disable radios but that stops the comms from the events / scenario. Plus, you can still update your map by hopping around.

[Hector]

Regarding TS. I think it depends on the persons. Most people i play with are very respectful imho. we use it for planning, for warning buddies, and usually to get new directions from bosses. Sometimes the Mexicans under my command, be it under US GI or Bundeswehr, get stuck when enemy resistance gets stiff. A bit of the right words and we get in the move again. TS is way quicker to do that. I usually resort to in game text chat to allow channel for company commanders and platoon or tank leaders who are in the heat of the battle. Only in emergancies do i warn, or if channel is free i update info, such as new sightings, destroyed targets, potential threast that I personally am not capable of suprres, or new locations of units which lost radio and do not update in the map. I dont remember now an ocation in which we had trouble to communicate. But, SB MP also runs without me, so others might have had unfortunate experiences, that surely am not aware of.

I dont need to say that i am with the TS users. But if needed i can go to chat and idle when i am about to get a game. ICQ has also worked fine for me.

Héctor

[Hector]

Also, like Shot and Mapman, I love to inform when dismounts or units, under or not under my command have sound contact

[Kingtiger]

Geezez, just popped in in text chat and theres 7 players including me... havent seen that for several months!!! nice to see inded =)

[RIPper]

i'm visiting the chat for the last few days and i see quite many people around there. i've met Cobra there so i had my first MP game, and it was great...

[Vacquero]

And a written warning is less startling than a screamed one. Or when somebody is screaming at somebody to move their units, whilst you are trying to pick off a target, that's in your six, and within knife fighting range. Nothing is better than when you are about to lay your tube on a tank that hasn't quite noticed you yet, and somebody starts yelling, next thing you know a sabot is sitting in your lap. LOVE IT :(

[Lone*star49]

And a written warning is less startling than a screamed one. Or when somebody is screaming at somebody to move their units, whilst you are trying to pick off a target, that's in your six, and within knife fighting range. Nothing is better than when you are about to lay your tube on a tank that hasn't quite noticed you yet, and somebody starts yelling, next thing you know a sabot is sitting in your lap. LOVE IT :(
...

:shock: whatever do you mean..? hehehe

8) Come to the dark side, where we speak little, and use the power for, bad, dark thinking, teleporting thoughts, instead..


LS :wink: