Teamspeak- Voice Chat

In the interests of trying to streamline our "high-end" instance fights, we're in the process of testing Teamspeak. Teamspeak is a voice chat program that is client/server. We download the client and operate a channel on a server. We had ,briefly, considered Roger Wilco which is another popular gamers chat program, but one of our PC's would have to host the chat room. This could add latency, which we all agree we don't need more of. So how does it work? Pretty simple really....

1. Download the client at www.goteamspeak.com and install it.
2. Make sure you have a microphone and speakers (like, duh)
3. Open Teamspeak, click on "connection" in the upper right hand corner
4. Click "connect", then click on "Local Addressbook"
5. On the right side of the window is "Server Address" which for us is 68.202.196.150:8768 (Note: there is now a password and you can email Wolfbrother for it)
6. For "Nickname" I'm using my character name (it's visible to others on the server)
7. Then "Default Channel" for us is HoS
8. At this point we need to setup the sound and mic settings. This is easiest with someone else listening to you. First , make sure your mic is plugged in and is not muted. Open up windows volume contol and make sure its not muted . Click on settings in the upper right side of the teamspeak window and adjust your mic output volume. My sound card has a feature under its volume control to boost the mic by 20db. Yours may be different but if someone can hear you and says your to quiet this may be the culprit. Then it's my recommendation at this point to select "Push to Talk" and bind a key to press while talking, in my case Right CTRL. This will be far less annoying than voice activated, unless you like to hear peoples sneezing and giggling and TV shows and yada, yada, yada.....

It's alot less complicated than it sounds and once set it's pretty easy to use. Open the program, log into the channel, launch WoW. When someone joins the channel this HOT computer chick voice comes on and says something like "User Joined Channel". Then you just hit your push to talk key and find out who it is. Simple. (This voice actually reminds me of the "Nuclear warning" voice from Starcraft)

But look at it this way, it'll be easier to hit a button and yell "Baltazzar STOP!" then to try and type it, which usually looks something like this:

[Guild] Wolfbrother: Baltazzar HOLD.......NM

[Guild] Baltazzar: RUN!

Baltazzar has died

Wolfbrother has died

Laila has died

[Guild] Baltazzar: Sorry guys, didn't think they would all come....

So as you can see, it could be advantageous. A simple "Freeze!" plus much faster coordination MAY reduce wipes. Could work. We seem to wipe alot more when we can't get a course of action quickly. This can speed things up, plus we are all friends so actually talking to each other could be entertaining in and of itself.....

Give it a shot, I log into it before I launch so if I'm online, I'm on teamspeak...

Wolfbrother -out-