Cardioid Vocal projection?
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GenesisAria
I noticed that the voices seem to have a cardioid or similar projection pattern for their voice, so that they are more clear and audible when facing towards the listener?
This would have a pretty nebulous but dramatic impact on how people interact in the game, and probably result in a lot of people having troubles hearing people in unexpected contexts. It's subtle and technical, so most people will not realize what the issue is.
For example if you are a group of people and running together somewhere, the person in the lead might be talking, joking, narrating something or whatever, but if their voice is just getting lost in the void in front of everyone and nobody behind can hear, this can be an issue.
People have been used to omnidirectional voice audio sources for years, and changing this would pretty widely impact people.
You can get somewhat used to it, but there's going to be a lot of cases where someone just wasn't as loud or clear as they should have been because they turned away, and it'll lead to volume confusion.
If anything i think it's sensible to have this only enabled when earmuffs are on; or perhaps something the world can override. It should probably be off by default.
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lackofbindings
Is it possible to rename this post to something like “remove cardioid vocal projection” ? I almost upvoted it by accident not realizing it’s already in and they were asking to
remove
it.
StormRel
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Catboy Slim
i disagree. the cardioid shape makes it much easier for multiple conversation circles to exist near each other for people with sensory processing disorders. it's a straight upgrade, and people will learn to face each other when they talk, just like in real life.
GenesisAria
Catboy Slim i wish i could agree with you, but it's a change 99.99% of users will be unaware of and it would add confusion. People don't expect online spaces to have realistic voice projection, every single proximity voice chat in like every game ever has been omnidirectional.
I very frequently have conversations with people that are facing in arbitrary directions or are facing a mirror instead of me, or are walking with me around various worlds.
I didn't say get rid of it, i said have it enabled by the world or by earmuffs mode. When there is lots of conversations in a semi-condensed area, i always turn on earmuffs so i can pick out relevance of conversation by how far away they are.
Consider this situation: in a busy lobby, and having a conversation with a group, and one of them turns away turning the conversation while they are talking t look around the room, and their voice clarity drops a ton and gets drowned out by the other voices simply because they turned away from you to survey the room or because they were pointing to something they were talking about. Or the opposite, someone on the other side of someone else having a conversation and they're facing someone who has their back to you, but their voice is clearer because it's facing you through that person.
There's too many random cases like this where it would cause an inconsistent experience, especially because it's adding on top of peoples' struggles with their own microphone volumes already. Imagine someone's not facing you, you say they are too quiet, can't hear them, so they turn up their mic, then they face you and they're too loud now.
As someone who is in many kinds of paces all the time, frequently world hops, and has extremely diverse levels of conversation from casual to heavy philosophical in all kinds of contexts and numbers of people, cardioid voice patterns would be more disruptive than not.
I don't want to have to tell people to face me when they are talking to me (enforcing conversation etiquette is disruptive to conversation).
Zel
GenesisAria:
Hey,
this is indeed an intended change.
We are open to feedback on this though and I will pass yours on to the team for discussion.