I know there have been many threads about 3d voip. But after the cross-hairs podcast i thought to give a bit on this. In a game for general team communication indeed a global/team based talk system is best for discussing tactics and stuff and getting teamwork going.
However sometimes you want to say something to people in your close vicinity, like to shout, i'm reloading or grenade or follow me. You don't want your entire squad or team to hear you say that. It only matters to those nearby, and to those nearby they need to know the direction and distance it is coming from.
So its not so much a case for me that 3d voip should completely replace regular voip (although a server option would be nice), but could actually complement the system. To keep the main communication pipe more clean, especially as I know that in 8v8 clan matches it can already be difficult to keep the communicational pipes clean.
But that sometimes you just need to say something to those those close by, and they need to receive how close you are and from what direction you are talking.
Exactly, i can understand Ramm's reasoning that 3D Voip is easilly circumvented, because it is, but we where not hoping for only 3D Voip, we where hoping for 3D voip as an addition to the squad and team channels, so you can talk to just that one guy standing next to you, about things that the whole squad doesen't need to hear (like "Greande! Run!" or "You move and i'll cover" and so forth), in addition to talking to your whole squad or whole team.
Having that would be hugely benificial in creating small scale teamplay between random people who are within clouse proximity of eachother, and incourage people in Pubs to create fire teams, to cover eachotehr when leapfrogging between cover, warn about dangers and do small scale on the fly coordination.
Now that said, it certainly won't ruin the game for me if it's not included, i would look on it as a lost oppertunity to improve the teamplay (especially on Pubs, where i do my playing), and that's unfortunate, but it's no game breaker, i just won't do much talking, because usually when i want to say something, it's in situations where the whole squad or team doesen't need to hear it, and i choose just to shut up instead.
I'm a little more worried about what was said about vehical chat, because it sounds like there's only one vehical channel, and thus, anything you say can be heard by anyone in any vehical..
That's not good, if i'm team-tanking, then i need to be able to talk to the other person(s) in my tank, and the vast amount of information is going to be useless to anyone but thouse people sharing my tank, it's going to be stuff like "Stop!" "go left here" "there's a good hull-down position over by that big rock on the right" and so on, utterly useless voice spam to anyone outside the tank.
This was a major reason why team-tanking on pubs in Ost was allmost impossible, people either didn't want to use Voip because they would spam everyone with useless information, or if they did it anyway, and it became a garbled mess of gunners talking to their drivers and nobody could make heads and tails of all the information, must of it beeing worthless or people talking over eachother.
I hope this is adressed, and that, for instance, choosing the "Squad" channel when inside a tank means you only talk to people inside your tank.
This is what killed tanking in Ost for me, i didn't like solo-tanking, and team-tanking was neigh impossible on Pubs due to lack of communication.