Arcanum

Arcanum's vent hosting provider has recently contacted us to see if we'd like to switch to Mumble instead of vent - as it is a low latency and auto-normalising voice platform. Vent latency has been an issue a few times for the raid teams (explosion in 10 seconds means explosion in 8 seconds after you hear this) so is something we are considering.

Please look at the following article about vent vs mumble and feel free to discuss your thoughts or concerns below.

The main issue this may cause is the smaller userbase of Mumble currently means pugs will have more difficult a time joining our groups casually.

The officers will be discussing this shortly, so please provide your input below

Hey all!

I've had a little bit of experience with mumble in my old guild.

Pros I saw:

• MUCH clearer voices and people actually sounded much more like they did in RL.

• Better latency.

• Not 100% sure if its for everyone but I found a lot of people I had trouble hearing were normalised completely. (I've tried normalising vent but the odd person is still just plain quiet)

• The optional in game interface is something vent should have had years ago. Particularly in a guild with such a large user base, its good to be able to see who is talking if you do not know there voice.

• While pugging may cause issues, in a guild our size I would hope we do not need to pug that many

• There are lot of cool customisation/tweaks you can do

The cons I found:

• Trying to get pugs to download/use mumble can be a nightmare.

• The computer illiterate may have trouble setting up parts of it (At least from the version I saw of it)

Just my 2c

<3 bel.

awesome banner as an offtopic

I have conflicting thoughts on this, as I find non-guild pugs to be a regular occurance for our group, and with that in mind using mumble would be a hinderance.

That being said, if it reduces costs for the guild, it would be hard to pass up, as I have heard very good things about the quality of the mumble services, and the pro's Bel has detailed are very attractive! If we needed to, we could cover a small vent server for our own purposes if we needed to, and use mumble for all guild stuff.

Are we able to try out the mumble service at all first gwen?

PS. ditto Gwen, i just made one You should be able to list your ctc cap as a stat =(

You can get vent for 10 people hosted free, cant you?

Because our raid team still has an open raid spot, we are using pugs every week, so I'm not sure how much it would work for us. Also the 25mans etc almost always have pugs...

Mumble does sound good though. I do think there would be issues making it work with the number of pugs the guild uses.

PS Loggy, your signature is worse than your profile pic.

I think the use a more effective and efficient tool of communication such as mumbles should be considered. Obviously the pro's out way the cons so the choice should be an easy one.

Personally I think mumbles would be worth a try. Surely if vent is so widespread when pugs are being formed another server can be utilised? It seems all of the issues that have been brought up are intermittent and should not be longterm.

Hopefully in the case of your raid team Cheya, there will not be any need for pugs soon when you fill it with a permanent member.

Also can chance of posting up the difference between mumbles and ventral?

I'm more than willing to contribute to something that I use

#5562354 Logilix wrote:

I have conflicting thoughts on this, as I find non-guild pugs to be a regular occurance for our group, and with that in mind using mumble would be a hinderance.

That being said, if it reduces costs for the guild, it would be hard to pass up, as I have heard very good things about the quality of the mumble services, and the pro's Bel has detailed are very attractive! If we needed to, we could cover a small vent server for our own purposes if we needed to, and use mumble for all guild stuff.

Are we able to try out the mumble service at all first gwen?

The costs wont actually be any less - the offer we've been given is to switch from vent to mumble on the same account plan, etc - so cost wont really be a consideration.

That said, I don't want you guys having to sort out your own vent server. The guild has more than enough donations at the moment to afford a 15 slot vent server for say 6 months to help facilitate a transition for your team if that would help. That said - I'm still not 100% sold on the transfer due to the pug issue.

We actually already do have a 10 slot mumble server set up and running (and I can host them myself as they are open source):

Host: mumble1.shivtr.com
Port: 40334
Password: fish

Which you're welcome to have a play with. The mumble client can be downloaded from http://mumble.sourceforge.net/.

The other option is I could talk to frosty about the guild using his vent server as the backup to the mumble one for whenever we need it - he's offered this in the past.

In the meantime, I might get my team to trial using mumble on the above 10 slot server and see how we go.

Thanks for the feedback

#5565190 Gwendral wrote:

That said, I don't want you guys having to sort out your own vent server. The guild has more than enough donations at the moment to afford a 15 slot vent server for say 6 months to help facilitate a transition for your team if that would help. That said - I'm still not 100% sold on the transfer due to the pug issue.

I appreciate that offer, but wouldn't want to force additional costs on the guild for it. The possibility of borrowing space on frostys server may be ideal for the transition?

That being said, if mumble is all that it is advertised to be, I would definitely push our group onto it as quickly as possible, but as Cheyu said that may be more trouble than it is worth at least until we can find a damn shadow priest! Unfortunately it is not always feasible to pug from within the guild.

As you said I also have reservations about the transition just for general groups like the 25 man FL runs that occur weekly and are generally supported by pugs. I will be keen to see how easy / difficult it is to coax pugs onto a different voice client. It may turn out not to be that much of a hurdle. Plus if pugs cant manage that, maybe we would be better off with different pugs. (I hope i dont have issues now i've said that)

I have logged onto the mumble server this arvo - can I ask you guys what pings you get to the server? Do we know where it is located?

#5565190 Gwendral wrote:

The other option is I could talk to frosty about the guild using his vent server as the backup to the mumble one for whenever we need it - he's offered this in the past.

I think it'd be great to test the mumble server for a week or two, and then maybe go with the above (assuming it's ok with Frosty!). I'd also be interested to see how many pugs might already have mumble, and how much of an issue it is... Our other consideration being, even if we can ever source our spriest / lock, that we do often have people away and tend to get pugs from outside the guild to fill these spots.

There doesn't seem a whole lot of point in getting a 15man vent server? Who's running 15man raids

Just trailed Mumbles. Seems great. Once the overlay is able to be used i think it will be great. Looking forward to seeing it in action in a raid situation.

P.S Make sure you read during the set-up process otherwise you will sound a little distorted. /glare Zemoch

Correct me if I am wrong, but the mumble server is located in the states while the vent server is in Sydney.

I think any of the benefits gained from going to mumble will be far outweighed by the terrible ping (250-300ms) everyone will have to the server. Unless mumble works very differently and I am missing something?

Gwen, if it is the same company providing the service (vent and mumble), can we ask for a mumble server hosted in australia?

That is correct Loggy - but only for the trial mumble server. This web hosting account provides a free 10 slot mumble server that we are using for testing.

IF we do migrate the vent server to mumble, it will be located on the same server that our vent is currently hosted. Keep in mind I also sometimes move the vent server to different locations if particular data centers are suffering from latency issues.

Sounds good then - set it to the Melbourne hosting and lock it in IMO as we all know that we are more important down here in victoria.

Haha actually I'd rather it was in Melbourne. Syd and Melbourne have excellent backhaul links to each other, but other cities like SA and Perth have better responses to Melbourne than Sydney. The difference between Sydney and Melbourne hosting will be negligable for Syd + Melb users, but possibly noticable for those in other places.

But - we'll take whatever we can get if we switch. I shall chat to the officers this week and get a confirmation.

In my previous guild we hosted both Mumble (for all guild runs) and Ventrilo (for pug runs).

We never had any real problems getting people set up. Once most of the raid team got familiar with using it and configuring it anyone could help a pug get set up in pretty quick time.

Sound quality is much better on Mumble in my opinion. Not so much of that static, delays, or distortion that sometimes plague Ventrilo.

The absolute best thing about Mumble is that it auto levels everyone. No more having to wind down the volume on the loudmouths who just won't shut up, or trying to crank it up for raid leaders who whisper directions with all the vocal force of a field mouse.

The overlay that Mumble has for WoW means you can see who is talking without needing the client to be visible. And you can have avatars that appear in the overlay.

Security, with keys, is much better. You can ban the tards and they can't come back without wiping their identity on all Mumble servers.

The big con in my opinion is that the installed base is much smaller and you would need to get pugs and new members to install it more often than not. Not insurmountable, just annoying.

I'd advocate at least running in parallel.

Cheers,

Cz