When I am playing a PC game with my buds online (like Starcraft 2, Diablo III,  Team Fortress 2, Torchlight II, or *cough* World of Warcraft) it is always easier to coordinate your games and more fun if you have these two things:

• Online Voice Chat Software
• Beer

While I don’t know of too many free alternatives to beer, there are several good free alternatives to the traditional VoiP for Games software which is Ventrilo.

Before Ventrilo, there was Teamspeak, which my first MMORPG group used to chat while we slayed 1 million boars in the forest. The free version of Teamspeak was a bit weird to get set up, the sound quality not great, the lag was noticeable, and it seemed to lack some of the features that its hot cousin, Ventrilo, had out of the box.

So even though we had a moderate solution, and moderate beer. We still didn’t have a great solution for our gaming.

Ventrilo on its own is a great tool, the feature set large, and it doesn’t get in the way of game playing and isn’t a memory hog. The problem with Ventrilo though is that if you are only using a free version then you can’t have an experience that is good for everybody equally. Someone has to run the “server” software on their computer as well as the “client” software, and usually that person doesn’t have enough cpu and/or bandwidth to support more than 1 other person. Spending money on a hosted Ventrilo server in the cloud solves the problems, but it is a monthly recurring fee (and a somewhat pricey one if you only need it one night of the week).

My buds and I tried Ventrilo, and aside from the lag of the free version, it would have been fine. But it had lag, so it wasn’t. But we did have beer. And that was worth the money. Ventrilo wasn’t.

Skype was the next thing we used, and while it did allow each of us to connect with each other and have a free and mostly lag-free experience, the convoluted user-interface and its constant auto-tabbing of us from the game when someone else tried to “join the call” made it less than ideal for gaming.

Four to Five of us used Skype for many months, dealing with trying to add people to existing calls, splitting groups, and all that non-sense. This kept us sustained, but only it still felt like a sub-par gaming experience. At least we still had our beer.

Then I found Dolby Axon – which was is a lot like Skype without the Skype – so it is actually nothing like Skype, and that was a big plus with me. In fact, it is like the penultimate mix of TeamSpeak and Ventrilo – it is free (a paid version is available), it has persistent voice chat rooms so you don’t have to tab-out of your game to add people to the game (unlike Skype which tabs you out without warning), it has ad hoc chat rooms for when you want to split your group for 2v2 Starcraft matches, it has good sound quality and the lag is on par with Teamspeak. In fact, the worst thing that I can say about this tool is that the UI does take a little getting used to for the beginner. Ventrilo vets will have no problem with this, however.

“Beers we have! Virtual Pub we have! Let the debauchery begin!” – Midnight Ike

There are of course a handful of other solutions, and Mumble is one of them. I haven’t yet reviewed it because I found what we needed in Dolby Axon, but really, any of these solutions are solid if you are willing to pay. If I were to pay for a server however, I would probably go back to using Ventrilo, as hosting is as little as $2/month with some internet vendors.

if(needpaidsolution)

    {solution = “ventrilo”}

else

    {solution=”dolby axon”}

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