What is your favourite voice chat application for gaming?

Cromulent

Cromulent

Cromulent

Soldato
Joined
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England
I'm just wondering what the most popular voice chat application is amongst gamers? I'll be needing to set up a voice chat server for a group of gamers shortly and I'm trying to decide which one to use. At the moment I am thinking of setting up a Mumble server because it is free and open source, the voice chat quality is excellent if you raise the bit rate up to max and it is very secure because it uses certificates rather than passwords for authentication.

So what is your favourite voice chat app?

Mumble
Teamspeak
Ventrilo
Discord
Something else

I'm really interested to find out although I imagine that most gamers have more than one installed based on who they are talking to.
 
Discord cause it is free and very easy to use. It's still being very actively developed and improved which is a bonus.
 
Most groups I've played with have time and time come back to TeamSpeak - its not without its issues but generally seems to be the easiest to live with once its running.

Over the years people I've played with have tried to get people to move onto various alternatives and ran into various latency, compatibility or performance issues.
 
Rroff said:
Most groups I've played with have time and time come back to TeamSpeak - its not without its issues but generally seems to be the easiest to live with once its running.

Over the years people I've played with have tried to get people to move onto various alternatives and ran into various latency, compatibility or performance issues.
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Which is why Discord will take over. It's very good at what it does, plus it's free.
 
^^ Seen that a few times before (as the hype for new upcoming voice comms clients) :P not happened yet.

To be fair I got out of serious online gaming about the time Discord began to become popular but I know people were having performance/stability issues with it a few months back on bigger servers/longer gaming sessions.
 
Discord for me, it's taken over TS3 in terms of functionality and its simplicity. As far as VoIP is concerned its about the same quality. But the chat function is so much improved over TS3.
 
One of the reasons I like Mumble is the ACL features which allow some quite complex configurations when set up correctly. I've been using Discord for a little while and while the latency to the London server has improved dramatically after a recent hardware upgrade it still doesn't provide the configuration options that Mumble does (I think Teamspeak also allows complex configuration as well). Which is why I'm leaning towards Mumble.

Plus Discord requires you register and it appears some users are not that keen on the idea.
 
Dunno if its still a problem but awhile back with Mumble a small number of people were having unfixable feedback loop problems - had it myself on my gaming PC so had to use my laptop alongside my gaming PC to use Mumble when gaming.
 
I'm really torn on TS3 & Discord right now. I like the features of Discord and the fact it's free and works very well. But TS still does somethings that it can't, like integrating plugins for games like DCS or ArmA for more realistic distance/radio based communications.
 
Since I setup my Discord server I haven't even touched Teamspeak.

Discord does the basics TS does but better and for free. We have had 20+ people in different channels on my sever, playing different games and with no major issues so far.

Winner!
 
JOSH86 said:
We have had 20+ people in different channels on my sever, playing different games and with no major issues so far.
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The problems with it tended to be when you were running more like 100+ users (i.e. eve online) and it would pretty much fall apart (might be solved now though I dunno as I've had nothing to do with it in months).

randal said:
TS3 for us, runs on my VPS and hasn't skipped a beat since it was installed.
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Likewise had TS3 on a VPS for 3-4 years without any issues at all - it just worked.

EDIT: Though I had problems with the licensing side to unlock the user limit as there were commercial sites running on the same IP though completely unrelated to the TS3 use :(
 
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Rroff said:
The problems with it tended to be when you were running more like 100+ users (i.e. eve online) and it would pretty much fall apart.
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Ah right, god knows how Discord would stack up with that amount of usage.

Be interesting to see, if I had that many users then I would probably go with TS then.

Thankfully 20-25 is the max I generally get and that is normally peak time once in a blue moon. For the 10-15 regulars it is spot on.
 
TS3 for me, although I do like discord. Our community is reasonably large so TS is better for us, but I see the attraction of discord and really like the better chat
 
Rroff said:
Likewise had TS3 on a VPS for 3-4 years without any issues at all - it just worked.

EDIT: Though I had problems with the licensing side to unlock the user limit as there were commercial sites running on the same IP though completely unrelated to the TS3 use :(
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Now you mention it I think I had some licensing issues during setup, possible down to it being silly AM and not firing on all cylinders... Other than that it's been a doddle to assign permissions and set security up etc.
 
I'm currently juggling between Mumble, TS3 and Discord. Out of all of them my favourite is Discord so far, the IRC like chat functionality makes me happier than it should.
 
randal said:
Now you mention it I think I had some licensing issues during setup, possible down to it being silly AM and not firing on all cylinders... Other than that it's been a doddle to assign permissions and set security up etc.
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Assume its still the same but the free server used to be locked to 32 concurrent users unless you requested a license - at which point they do some checking to see if you are a commercial user or not.
 
Yep, that sounds about right. I think I started going down the paid route and getting shouty as to why the free version wasn't working, then I realised I still needed a key or some such.

May have drunk a bottle of wine by that point also, I forget. All very hazy. :D
 
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