I don’t know, it’s not like they’ve never banned people for what they say (or in my case just for listening) on third party chats before. I was caught up in the Erotica 1 ban wave many years ago, when CCP decided that scams are a bannable offence ackshully and anyone in the TS, even those who were just listening in on this particular mark’s bonus round, should be permanently removed from EVE. It took them years to reverse this decision and unban those of us who appealed.
If they’re already taking on the duty of moderating third-party services and player activities outside of the game, moderating a first-party service is surely no great burden.
I am ok with the balkanization of the communications again. Eve DID have voice chat once upon a time and most pilots tended not to use it so it was removed. I also find Discord very noisy.
While it has been years since i was in a large 0.0 alliance, I would assume that even if they use discord they still use other voice coms like mumble anyway. That makes it a lot easer to manage fleets with allies anyway, without having them sit on your discord where you have to manage roles and ■■■■ or remove ppl again and stuff. While on mumble you can just give them a temp link to join for the fleet and thats it.
And for anything else eve related you don´t need a replacement since you can just keep using it without ID-verification and nothing changes at all.
Not saying you can not go back to old forums style stuff, though if it really bothers you that much. Just pointing out that the changes to discord have 0 effect on an eve group unless you really “need” to post NSFW stuff (for whatever creepy reason).
No…the voice chat in Second Life is optional. You can switch it off completely. And if you do have it switched on, it exists at 3 different levels…
One on one voice chat. You can decline or leave such a chat from anyone ( they have to ask permission first ) even if you have VC switched on.
‘Conference level’. This is where multiple people may be invited to an individual’s chat. Once again, you are invited and you can decline…or leave at any time.
‘Parcel Level’. This is where members of a group ( similar to corp in EVE ), occupying a parcel of land, can chat on that parcel of land. Often used by DJs. Once again it is optional…though in this case the default is set to on.
Someone with a brain clearly thought out this system. You have total control over who or what you hear. You can block individuals or groups. Actually the same goes for text chat…which has for years had the ability ( which EVE only just got round to ) to block certain words. You can block local chat completely. The end result is that I very rarely encounter any negative VC.
Actually…one of the great things about blocking anyone in SL is that they effectively cease to exist as far as you are concerned. Their avatar is not even displayed any more.
If you mean Daniel the troll….I’d imagine quite a few have ‘un-existed’ him. I often use that feature when someone just teleports right on top of me and just stays there and ignores that I am there….which is considered rude in SL.
They are not. That’s precisely the point. CCP does not want to expand their moderation duties even further, and adding ingame chat would make them liable for a host of situations. It is indeed a great burden. Erotica 1 deserved to be banned, but CCP does not have the staff to continually monitor hours of player voice chat. This is precisely why they relegate it to third party services.
I don’t think it needs to be that intensive. Add an option to right-click report someone, which will snip the last fifteen seconds or whatever and send it to a queue, multiple reports in rapid succession moves a reported player up the queue, and that should be good enough. AI moderation is already plenty capable of recognising the most typical reasons to report someone (ie slurs, illegal content), and isn’t overly burdensome to run, and the handful of edge cases can be passed along to ISD for human arbitration.
Besides, alternatives do exist and will continue to be used in lieu of ingame voice chat. With the very common chat disruptions and other weird backend problems that are in the game currently, ingame voice chat in EVE is already a very doomed prospect. And I’m sure the extra load to the servers, if ingame voice chat was used in big style, would multiply already existing connection issues a thousand fold.
On the other hand an eve chat client would vastly improve the game (whether it’s in-game or an extension).
But how about this for a crazy idea. Words (unless they’re predatory) don’t actually hurt anyone and when we encounter speech we dislike we can simply ignore it and move on. Or, if we feel really spicy, we can debate one another to express our own ideas! I know this shatters the current paradigm and deletes all reason for censorship but it’s a thought worth entertaining. Even if it is a ridiculous pipe dream in 2026 where we all live with cameras jammed up our noses and data brokerage centers selling our nosehair data to shaving companies.
For any new system feature (not plain game feature), you either need to have experienced developers from the field or outsource the solution to a third party service provider.
Unless a feature is absolutely necessary, management usually goes for third party service integrations, because hiring costs of a whole audio team is not small. There are also significant research and development costs in both time and money, because each software environment is different and has its own specific needs. For EVE, those are fleet fights and server load in them - something that Second Life, or any other game, does not have. Which also means that the development will last for about a year and have issues for a year more, just because of the unpredictability of the environment and server load.
If you go for third party integration, you are just as a company choosing the platform instead of your customers. You save on hiring costs and initial development time, but you again need to work on ironing out challenges of your specific environment.
Of course all of that can be invested in and can be developed, but only if the feature is critical to the product and there are no viable alternatives that users already use - which we already do. Because you need your comms even when game client crashes or is unstable, or you simply want to communicate without opening the game client, the vast majority already uses third party solutions.
Justifying development of a whole new system feature that will only cause more issues, while many of your customers are already using something else is hard. And before you say “If the users are already using other solutions, the load will not be that much of a problem“, you need to learn about unpredictability of user behavior and edge cases which do happen.
So, your options are:
wait for CCP to hire devs, research and develop a system for about a year, then wait for another year for the problems to be detected and ironed out;
wait for CCP to choose the audio comms service provider for you, integrate it and overcome challenges specific to EVE environment
just install TeamSpeak, like the rest of us, and move on