Voice Chat for Small Groups: DallasXtreme Ventrilo

Voice chat can make all the difference in an MMO. When I first started Guild Wars I played almost exclusively with pick-up groups, aka PUGs. (That’s random people brought together by their need to complete the same quest). In a Guild Wars PUG, communication is almost exclusively done through typing very short sentences (“pull shaman now!” “Ack, wait!” “Rez, plz…”) and drawing directions on the in-game map. I haven’t seen a group yet where someone doesn’t attempt to draw either a penis, boobs or a smiley face during the inevitable long walk from A to B.

All that changed when my friends bought the game. Voice communication is essential for a game like Guild Wars where quick reactions can make or break a battle. It’s far too easy to miss instructions as they whizz past on the screen.

Being the cheap-arses that we are, my team couldn’t be bothered to sign up for a dedicated team VoIP system. There were only four of us so we used Skype’s conference call feature. It has problems but it did the job. I can’t imagine ever going back to typing out tactical discussions. Less typing means I can spend more time on perfecting my penis-drawing skills reacting quickly in the heat of battle to save my fellow guildies.

There are many, many companies providing VoIP services suitable for gamers. DallasXtreme offered me a small payment for an honest review of their Ventrilo server services, via the ReviewMe program. They have a server based in London so hey, why not?

Sign-up:
Super easy – it took about 15 minutes. That includes the time to log in to PayPal and make my first month’s payment.

Service:
Speedy – I signed up at 11pm on Sunday. My Ventrilo server login info was emailed to me an hour later.

Voice-chatting experience:
Hmm… not so good. Surprising, for a ping time of 15ms on my end.

TheFluffyFist and I both downloaded Ventrilo and logged on to our DallasXtreme server. This bit was easy considering neither of us have used any similar software. After lots of unashamedly lame hilarity involving the text-to-speech recognition, we sorted out our Ventrilo configurations and logged onto Guild Wars to test-drive it properly.

Totally Unplayable.

We had a 7-second lag between speaking and hearing the response. After fiddling with codec options and shutting down absolutely everything except GW and Ventrilo we got it down to 4 seconds but that’s still too much if you’re calling for backup in a busy battle. Or even just trying to have a coherent conversation among friends.

Rather sad, because US$4.95 (£2.60) a month isn’t half bad if you have a small group. We tried out another VoIP method in case the delay was down to a localised Internet malaise but it showed no such lag.

Verdict:
Not great performance. One good thing came out of the test – we tried all their online test servers. I’m happy to report that we got exactly the same performance from the test servers as we did from our paid server. You could always try out DallasXtreme’s test servers if you need Ventrilo server hosting. You may get a better performance than we did.

Edit: Cancelling is very easy as well. I cancelled the subscription in PayPal and within minutes I received an email from DallasXtreme to inform me that my account was scheduled for cancellation. They have excellent basic service. Pity about the lag.

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