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Phoenix_Dragon · 05-24-2020, 05:20 PM

This whole thing has certainly revealed how differently people adapt and handle online gaming. I'm involved with three groups that do lots of online communications, two of which are because of Covid, and it's impressive just how much different the experience is.

One group plays an online video game (Arma 3). There are over a hundred members, and session player counts start at around 80 and dwindle down to around 20-30 by the end of the night. Despite being in a notoriously buggy game (Arma), which we then load a bunch of mods on top of that interact both with the game and a third-party voice-chat program, and having a wide variety of communication options (Proximity voice, various radio options, etc), it generally goes off without a hitch. Communication is clear and easy, everyone knows when to chill to let others speak, and everyone treats communications fairly seriously, so we never have poor-quality audio or significant background noise (To the point that the very few times it has happened, it's generally been pretty hilarious to everyone involved).

Then there's my online physics class, where the professor decided to run it like a normal class, but on Zoom. It's a bit less than 20 people. We established early that everyone (Except the professor) sets themselves to muted and used push-to-talk to speak up, so we don't get a bunch of extraneous sound. The professor is running things wirelessly at his house, which often has someone else doing a Zoom meeting and other online activity, so his feed often stutters or freezes for a moment. Sometimes someone gets dropped and can't get back in. Sometimes someone forgets to mute themselves and we all get to listen to their typing or breathing or out-of-class conversation for a bit until the professor gets their attention and has them mute again. So it's a bit awkward, but it works well enough.

And then there's the smallest group: my online roleplaying group. 7 people total, and I don't think we've gone a session without some serious issue. Depending on whether one of the players is with the DM or not, only 2 or 3 people use headphones, so we very frequently have echo-back. I'm the only one who uses a headset mike: the others use phone or laptop mikes at arm's length (Or further), so audio quality is crap. The one time someone else tried to use a headset mike, it was of such cheap quality that it was giving feedback from his own headset. We're using Facebook's video-chat, because the DM is on Facebook and therefor figures we should just use Facebook everything for this (And no, it's not because of familiarity; he originally wanted to use Facetime because he thought that was by Facebook, and we switched to this when he found out it wasn't). There seems to be no push-to-talk option for this program (At least not on PC, though I can still click the mute/unmute button to fake it), and it tries to duck the audio of anyone who isn't speaking, with the result that if two people try to speak, they're both basically inaudible due to random ducking. The one time we've done mapped-out combat, he sent phone pictures of the battlemat as the combat unfolded, which meant long pauses any time it had to be updated and awkward flipping between pictures to get a full view of what was going on and where we were. (The idea of using a virtual tabletop program was shot down, first because the DM didn't want to pay for one, and after it was pointed out that there were plenty of excellent free options, because he didn't want to put effort into some new system for this temporary arrangement). It has, frankly speaking, been a mess, because basically zero effort has gone into trying to adapt to the situation and make things work.

It just seems bizarre to me that the largest group I'm in has the least issues, by far, while the smallest group I'm in has the most.

05-24-2020, 05:20 PM	#72
Phoenix_Dragon Join Date: Apr 2005	Re: Has COVID hit your gaming? This whole thing has certainly revealed how differently people adapt and handle online gaming. I'm involved with three groups that do lots of online communications, two of which are because of Covid, and it's impressive just how much different the experience is. One group plays an online video game (Arma 3). There are over a hundred members, and session player counts start at around 80 and dwindle down to around 20-30 by the end of the night. Despite being in a notoriously buggy game (Arma), which we then load a bunch of mods on top of that interact both with the game and a third-party voice-chat program, and having a wide variety of communication options (Proximity voice, various radio options, etc), it generally goes off without a hitch. Communication is clear and easy, everyone knows when to chill to let others speak, and everyone treats communications fairly seriously, so we never have poor-quality audio or significant background noise (To the point that the very few times it has happened, it's generally been pretty hilarious to everyone involved). Then there's my online physics class, where the professor decided to run it like a normal class, but on Zoom. It's a bit less than 20 people. We established early that everyone (Except the professor) sets themselves to muted and used push-to-talk to speak up, so we don't get a bunch of extraneous sound. The professor is running things wirelessly at his house, which often has someone else doing a Zoom meeting and other online activity, so his feed often stutters or freezes for a moment. Sometimes someone gets dropped and can't get back in. Sometimes someone forgets to mute themselves and we all get to listen to their typing or breathing or out-of-class conversation for a bit until the professor gets their attention and has them mute again. So it's a bit awkward, but it works well enough. And then there's the smallest group: my online roleplaying group. 7 people total, and I don't think we've gone a session without some serious issue. Depending on whether one of the players is with the DM or not, only 2 or 3 people use headphones, so we very frequently have echo-back. I'm the only one who uses a headset mike: the others use phone or laptop mikes at arm's length (Or further), so audio quality is crap. The one time someone else tried to use a headset mike, it was of such cheap quality that it was giving feedback from his own headset. We're using Facebook's video-chat, because the DM is on Facebook and therefor figures we should just use Facebook everything for this (And no, it's not because of familiarity; he originally wanted to use Facetime because he thought that was by Facebook, and we switched to this when he found out it wasn't). There seems to be no push-to-talk option for this program (At least not on PC, though I can still click the mute/unmute button to fake it), and it tries to duck the audio of anyone who isn't speaking, with the result that if two people try to speak, they're both basically inaudible due to random ducking. The one time we've done mapped-out combat, he sent phone pictures of the battlemat as the combat unfolded, which meant long pauses any time it had to be updated and awkward flipping between pictures to get a full view of what was going on and where we were. (The idea of using a virtual tabletop program was shot down, first because the DM didn't want to pay for one, and after it was pointed out that there were plenty of excellent free options, because he didn't want to put effort into some new system for this temporary arrangement). It has, frankly speaking, been a mess, because basically zero effort has gone into trying to adapt to the situation and make things work. It just seems bizarre to me that the largest group I'm in has the least issues, by far, while the smallest group I'm in has the most.