The biggest MMORPG in the world is getting voice over IP added as a feature this week. It may not be a terrible idea to invest in some logiteck stock, because millions of players are going need a steady supply of headsets in upcoming months. On Tuesday the patch 2.2.0 for World of Warcraft went live, and the patch notes contained a line item explicitly stating the following:
"Voice Chat - The new Voice Chat feature is now available in game. Players will need to go into the options menu under Sound & Voice to activate it. Volume sliders are available for the microphone, speakers, and game-audio fade (which automatically lowers the game audio when a voice communication is received), as is a “push-to-talk” setting. Right-clicking on a player’s name now includes the option to mute or unmute that player. Muting another player blocks all voice chat from him or her; the ignore feature now blocks both voice chat and text chat from that player."
Upon logging into the actual game it became obvious the feature was not really turned on yet. Apparently they are gradually rolling it out starting with the lower population servers. The fact that they opted to include this line item in the patch notes as the very first thing made me very curious. Why do would they give false info in official patch notes that every single player sees, and expect everyone to read on the forums about how it's actually not included yet? They really set a lot of their fans scratching their heads with this. The only reason it's ok is that the feature itself is such an amazing addition to the game. Pick up groups will become a much more viable option for casual players and meeting other players will be easier then ever.
Then there is the really big feature to consider, the male / female factor. In a MMORPG like WoW there are a lot of nerdy guys running around, but there are also a lot of guys who deviously pretend to be girls in order to get nerdy guys to hook them up. Gold and items just seem to rain from the sky for female gamers. Here is a little hint. In the wake of VOIP being added to the game, any female character who doesn't talk to you over it is actually a man.