The following is a repost from this thread in the Assembly Hall forum on EVE’s website. I figured I’d post it here as well, seeing as the Hall thread has almost no chance against the walls of useless issue threads getting dumped in there every hour.
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Faction warfare’s got more people into PVP now in groups, presumably they’re utilizing EVE voice for the majority of voice comms. There’s been recent attention in patches to get things more stable, which is a good thing. Anyone I’ve spoken to who’s used EVE Voice has mentioned now the integration is great, and the quality is about a billion times better than Teamspeak (arguably the more common of the third part VOIP tools used by players).
Isn’t it now about time EVE Voice gets the feature we need, and a lot of people have been waiting for since it was first integrated into the EVE client? The feature that would make it infinitely more useful than it is now?
The external client.
I say THE external client, because this was a feature Vivox has touted in the past. It exists, what does not is the provision for it in EVE. The idea is that you would run the external client on your system and if EVE dies you don’t lose your connection to the channel(s) you were speaking in.
Is this even in the cards for us here, and if so what might the timeline be? I know historically the addition of features to the client has taken a staged approach, but EVE Voice has moved along at the pace of a snail moving against an Icelandic coastal wind.
I know this still wouldn’t make it a 100% replacement for third party services, but this would be a huge boost for adopting EVE Voice as a primary method of comms during ops for a lot of organizations.
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What do you think? Do you think CCP should finally get the Voice component into a more generally useful state? Hit the linked thread, bump it, and give it a thumbs up while you’re at it. 🙂
Winterblink 
Indeed the Eve Voice thing is used in most MinMatar fleets. And it works quite well. Sound quality is good too (though some ppl have some extremely crappy mics). What would be a good addition in the software though is a limiter, so that one person with a bad setup doesn’t deafen the entire fleet O_o.
Anyway, an external client would be nice, but it would have to communicate with the eve-client somehow, otherwise it would just be another teamspeak etc thing.
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Yeah, it was pitched at one point as taking over communications seamlessly when the connection the game has drops. So it’s not a separate client per se, just holds the connection in lieu of the game client not being active.
Not sure if it can initiate connections itself, I would imagine that wouldn’t be necessary in this case.
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I see Eve Voice as nice addition to Eve Online, yet.. Because of connection issues or whatever reasons I’m unable to use it, and always sounds garbled or I come accross garbled. So in this way, I stick to Vent and Teamspeak because of there reliability and low amount of bandwith they take up. And the fact, I can have perform Teamspeak on the Laptop, and thus allows Eve play more effeciently on my Desktop.
If CCP ever extends Eve Voice to an external client, I forsee almost 90% of Eve will go for it.
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Personally I think Teamspeak’s better than EVE voice, provided two important conditions are met:
1) It’s being hosted on a proper server and not by someone running it on a spare machine and trying to share their gaming connection.
2) The creator of the channel picks one of the higher quality codecs.
That said, I prefer Vent to either.
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