The Switch to Mumble
You might have seen from the blog posts or from our twitter feeds that Enveloping Shadows recently switched from to Mumble from Ventrilo. Here’s a little story about why we switched and why I’ve fallen completely in love with Mumble.
Primary Target Can Suck It
A few months ago, the small company that used to manage our Ventrilo server got bought out by Primary Target. They changed our server information, and then a slew of technical difficulties began.
The lag was unbearable for weeks. Vent would disconnect randomly at the most inconvenient times, kicking everyone out of the raid. We ended up raiding at least once on a public vent because ours crapped out in the middle of Heroic Putricide 25, while we were learning it. To add insult to injury, Primary Target apparently “lost” the prepayment our officers made for the original server. And their customer service was plain awful – the officers got in touch with them to try to figure out what was going on, and got no information whatsoever. Their customer service sucked and gave us no hope that anything would get better, anytime soon.
After a few weeks, our poor officers sighed and decided we’d have to move. Since we were switching anyways, we opted to give Mumble a try.
Mumble For The Win
I don’t know all the technical differences between Mumble and Ventrilo, nor do I really care about going into them in this blog post. You can go read plenty of other sites for that. As a tank, a very talkative person, and a weekend raid leader, here’s my impression of Mumble post-switch.
1) Sound Quality
It just plain sounds better. Vent sounds awful and scratchy in comparison. And voice modulation! I know you can do this with Vent, but Mumble does it so much better! Hearing the whole raid swoon as Mumble automatically modulated down the voice of a certain holy pally who enjoys screeching at the raid when something goes wrong… it was truly amazing.
2) People Can Talk Over Each Other
We have a talkative vent. People talk right over poor Rhidach constantly – he doesn’t just have to yell, he has to really moan and groan and threaten to quiet us all down, and even then people will start right back up with the banter when he’s done going through a strat. We will gleefully poke at each other, mock each other, and discuss everything from class changes to whose child is cuter straight through into a progression pull until a difficult game mechanic (or an irritated tank) shuts everyone up. We will also enter into a strategy discussion – a ton of us will – with equal gusto, and we like to hang out in vent for hours after raids. When we learned Heroic Putricide and Heroic Sindragosa, the hardest adjustment might have been to keep vent “clear” for plague call outs, healer calls and tank swaps.
We talk over each other. A lot. Vent sounds like crap when two people try to talk at once. Mumble doesn’t sound perfect, but you don’t get that crazy feedback noise, and you can hear everything said by each person.
3) No Latency. No Delay.
I have a lot of silly pet peeves. Raid calls are one. I get very, very irritated when someone takes it upon themselves to call something out and they call it out late. I watch raid warnings and listen to vent simultaneously, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a raid warning pop and heard a call just a half second or second later… and thought, with irritation, “That wasn’t exact. Why call it out?”
Little did I know, this was a Vent delay issue, not a raid awareness issue. Because as soon as we switched to Mumble, that mysterious and hard to quantify delay just… disappeared. I now hear calls simultaneous with raid warnings.
Oh my god, it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. As a raid leader, I was sold from the first Heroic LK pull. You don’t understand until you hear someone call a Defile target RIGHT AS the raid warning pops. It’s really cool.
Check out my post a few days ago on Heroic Halion, where I talk about how the healers yelled at people who had Combustion. I’d be willing to bet that Mumble over Vent made a difference as far as response time goes. I am an aural person. I respond better to sounds than visual cues, which is why I always play with game sounds on. Switching to Mumble was a game-changing experience for me.
The End Result
I don’t know if Rhi feels as strongly as I do. I know the whole raid was extremely skeptical, especially the day we lost about half an hour before raid while everyone found the client and installed it. And yet within an hour or so, everyone was completely sold on the new service.
Even though we’ve had some technical difficulties with Mumble, too, the people we’ve got the server from have been great about communicating with us when something goes wrong and when it’s likely to be fixed. Customer service is really worth a lot. No one’s said a thing about returning to Vent. I’m sure Mumble isn’t for everyone, but it sure has worked well for us.
Links: Here’s a nice little Youtube video with a display of Mumble’s latency vs Vent’s latency. The Mumble website, and a link to Multiplay, the company we bought our Mumble server from (they’re great!)
Armory Feed
@Rhidach
4 November 2010 at 3:54 pm #
Personally, I love Mumble. I really need to set up that option that silences everyone when I’m talking…
@Anafielle
4 November 2010 at 3:56 pm #
The raid would mutiny! :) It’s not a strategy lecture without at least two “that’s what she said”s …..
We just switched to Mumble for financial reasons (the ability of one of our officers to self-host the server and Vent’s free version is 8 users vs. 100 with Mumble) and I’m a total convert.
The only thing I don’t like about it is CALLING it Mumble, which seems so awkward compared to “Vent”!
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@Rhidach
4 November 2010 at 4:17 pm #
True! That is really hard to adjust to. I’ve been saying Vent for years now, it’s annoying to change.
I’ll add our voice to the choir. Our humble 10m crew switched to mumble some time in ICC and have been happy with it. It can take some hand holding to break very old vent habits of some raiders, but it’s worth the effort.
But do be careful to teach chip-eating mages about push-to-talk. Yikes.
I don’t suppose you guys have any comparison between
Teamspeak 3 and Mumble?
At least, delaywise TS3 has been massively better than TS2, but after this post I’m kinda curious how big the difference in this matter would be between Mumble and TS3.
Especially because our own TS3-Server is kinda dead at the moment and we can’t reach our admin at all :\
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My guildmaster showed me this post earlier today, and I must say that I am in love so far.
I’m working on a config at the moment, though I’ll be using pay hosting until I’m in a situation with decent upload(hosts can be found on the wiki. I went with Midnight Gamers and MMO Mumble. All cheap, cut-rate actually).
The server is up and running as we speak, just waiting for the select few of my computer-literate guildies to step into the test environment.
Thumbs up or down to come soon. Here is my basic user setup, including Positional Audio.
http://fuzzrug.com/uploaded/tardery/mumblesetup.jpg
After our raid tonight, a few of us have been playing around in mumble. We all love it, this is awesome, and they are using the text to speech ability right now. We tried yelling, and talking over each other, and otherwise we just have been testing it. It seems to be passing every test. Not to mention the latency difference. Its noticeable.
I just purchased a Mumble server from the company you linked to. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to log in as admin and create channels or groups, but hanging out in the lobby is good and everything sounds great. I am loving the overlay feature too. :)
@Anafielle
5 November 2010 at 8:15 am #
I completely forgot to mention the sexy overlay! Thanks for reminding me!! The overlay certainly is beautiful, although I keep it on “only person talking” mode since it can take up a ton of room in a 25 man raid. Glad to know I have made a convert to the church of Mumble. :)
To login as an admin, first thing is to go to the Clanforge page at Multiplay. I think its this site. http://clanforge.multiplay.co.uk/cgi-clan/manage.pl Once you login, go to the profiles section you should be able to see what the admin pw for the mumble server. If you already have that info then you just need to login as the superuser with that pw. Once in as the superuser you can create channels and change privileges for all groups. You might be able to just add the admin pw to your access tokens, and accomplish the same thing. I’m not positive this second one will work but the superuser one should work.
Just want to say that I have been using Mumble for a long time now. We used ventrilo before, but you have to pay. And our Linux users have trouble getting it to work. Mumble is perfect cross platform, its free, and in fact I am running our guild server on my linuxserver at home, works perfect. Good switch :)
So what are some good hosts for this in the US. I noticed that Multiplay is out of the UK, with some servers in the US, but are they good for US?
Our Vent is about to expire and our current host doesn’t offer Mumble, but we are really interested in switching.
Thanks!
@Anafielle
10 November 2010 at 6:56 pm #
We are located in the US and our server (from Multiplay) is in… chicago? Anyways, it works fine.
I wouldn’t be too concerned about their headquarters. Their customer service is excellent, and when there are problems we know about them from the news feed apparently. I recommend them for the US too.
I use multiplay for my mumble server, they autoselect your server location upon registering.
I’m in the UK with the data centre some 400 miles south of me in London. The sound/response quality is second to none. I can’t recommend them enough, and of course thanks to Anafielle for pointing me in the right direction.
Peace