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Voice Communications in EVE

By Drabzz

Introduction

There are a number of voice communication clients available to the EVE community, including Ventrilo, RogerWilco and TeamSpeak. For the purpose of this document I will assume Ventrilo (Vent) is being employed.
The setup and configuration of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) servers and clients is beyond the scope of this document, save to say that each application has ample instructions and support available to users. Your ingame colleagues can also provide help with setting-up Ventrilo on your computer.

Why Voice Communication?

Voice communications are essential when coordinating PvP combat and other essential team operations within EVE; the delay in communications presented by using text only communications in EVE chat channels can easily be exploited by a well-trained, well-practised enemy. This has been proven time, and time again to be true. In all combat operations, the response time must be immediate, otherwise the few seconds lost in the process will decide the outcome of the battle.
Players who are not or cannot connect to voice comms will be unable to play a full role in any combat scenario. Such players may be sidelined to prevent them from being a danger to themselves or others.
Once established, voice communications will be a major asset to our combat operations and play a useful role in all other aspects of EVE play.

Now We're Talking.

Things are never quite as simple as just establishing voice communication; there are several considerations and disciplines we must learn in order to benefit fully from this new means of communication.

Bandwidth:

Bandwidth in VoIP is limited to prevent a drain on your system resources and allow your game to function correctly and without undue lag. The more people who are talking at the same time, the more bandwidth is used; this means we must follow certain protocols in order to maintain good, effective communications.

Voice Discipline:

It is essential to establish good voice discipline, especially during combat; where people are excited by the prospect of a kill or panicked and fearing the loss of their ships. Keep your head; never shout or allow your panic to interrupt effective communications. You may cost us the battle - and a lot of isk. Correct use of voice procedure and confident, measured statements will go a long way to making voice communication the best weapon in our arsenal.

'Keep your head; never shout or allow your panic to interrupt effective communications. You may cost us the battle - and a lot of isk.'

Naval, military, police, coastguard and other uniformed services all adopt standard voice procedure. This standardisation is international, and with few variations, standard radio voice procedure is employed in every country in the world - even astronauts in space use it.
We can borrow some of their ideas to improve our gameplay within EVE. We can also do this without enforcing all of the rigid discipline of the military, and still achieve effective communications.

Call Signs:

Call signs quickly identify users (stations) on the communications network and are used extensively throughout the world as a naming and identity convention. Each service has strict guidelines for the naming of stations within their communications networks.
In EVE we are lucky that CCP has ensured we all have unique names which will also serve as our individual call signs.
In addition, you may also be assigned to a team with a call sign given by your operational commanders; 'India1' may be the callsign for the first interceptor team and 'Tango2' may be the second tackler team and so on.
In every effective network there is a Network Controller (NC) who monitors and regulates network traffic; ensuring good voice discipline is employed. The call sign for the NC is usually 'Zero'. Zero often acts as the event recorder too. For combat purposes, it is better that this job is taken by the most senior non-combatant available.
Good communications are as important as your weapons and skills in deciding the outcome of a battle; even more so where split-second timing is employed to spring traps, or save a colleague from destruction.
The main point here is that you need to react quickly and effectively to hails to your call sign. You need to monitor the comms network and be familiar with all call signs; you will then be able to build a mental picture of events as they happen. This coupled with your visual information, will give you and your commanders an excellent reading of the battle situation.

'Good communications are as important as your weapons and skills in deciding the outcome of a battle; even more so where split-second timing is employed to spring traps, or save a colleague form destruction.'

Common Words and Phrases

There follows a list of common words, phrases and abbreviations used in English speaking communication networks and EVE Online:

Voice Communication Phrase List

I have deliberately left out many words and phrases which have no meaning within EVE. The above list is small enough for you to learn easily and will provide for clear and concise communications.

Spelling Out Words:

Most of you will be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet; it is used worldwide to simplify the spelling of difficult to understand words over patchy communication links. I have listed the International Phonetic Alphabet below:

The International Phonetic Alphabet

Normalising Ventrilo

This will tweak ventrilo to balance out the quiet people and the loud people. Enjoy!

In vent, press setup. In the first tab, make sure 'Use DirectSound' is checked. Press the SFX button. Select 'Compressor' in the right box, then press the '<- Add' button. Select 'Compressor in the left box and press the 'Properties' button.

Set the knobs to:
Gain -7 (make this higher if people are too quiet)
Attack .01
Release 500ish
Threshold -31
Ratio 100.0
Pre Delay 4.0

Done!