Should we enable the voice chat?

[Whitestorm]

Recently, we had a decent activity on our cozy server and some intense matches. However, I found that it is tricky to work as a team because you don't know where your teammates are going, if they spotted some opponent activity, orders they're giving or you want to give. Using text chat takes so much time, especially when you're full of adrenaline, your hands are shaking and you say something unintelligible. Here are my arguments why the voice chat should be enabled:

1. Teamwork: as I indicated before.
2. Overcoming your language barrier: you may say that the server is international and not everybody knows English. However, playing the game is actually a really good way to improve your language and soft skills.
3. Hilarious moments and vibes: through the voice chat, we can know better each other (by understanding how other speak and feel), some perfectly caught quotes, plus, you feel that you're not sitting in total silence (except in-game sounds of course).

After few months of the patch 3374 release, the activity on the server have been decreasing unfortunately. I guess that some players didn't like the way we can't communicate quickly (or just the hype is gone like it has always been with every game, I can't really tell). I guess we won't lose anything giving a chance to the voice chat. Perhaps it can even entertain us a bit. The voice through the default CODEC_48NB is kinda difficult to understand but I actually like the vibe it emits: like talking to the military radio or something. Anonymous was able to use CODEC_96WB on his server (Anonymous Onslaught), we can try asking him to help us setting it up. After all, I'm not really picky about the codecs, I just want talking to people!

So, tell me what do you all think about this?

P.S. ah, and if you enable voice chat, you'll have access to exclusive content of me slurping my tea

[EmanReleipS]

I can see the appeal of using voice chat. The main issue with voice chat is the high capability for abuse and the difficulty of moderating it.

I remember playing on some UT2004 servers back in the early years of the game when players would play random music over it and other annoying sounds.
Us admins will have a hard time tracking any misbehavior and understanding player conflicts unless we are online at the exact moment, because it won't be recorded anywhere.
Add to that players using whichever language they speak, which we may or may not understand. Once it's written in chat, we can at least copy it into Google Translate.

We do have several Discord voice channels that our players can use if they want to coordinate better, and which also offers good voice quality. Unfortunately they aren't in use unless we are hosting a match event.

[Whitestorm]

I guess that's a valid point, then don't hesitate to invite me to some voice events on Discord (until it's not too late by CET). Probably will be sitting there AFK until someone shows up. Thanks!

[laboRHEinz]

Originally, we even had to disable voice chat simply because of that disgusting exploit:
'The UT2004 voice chat exploit refers to a historical buffer overflow vulnerability in the game's network/voice messaging implementation, often triggering a "Buffer overflow in net message" disconnect. Attackers would send malformed UDP packets or voice data payloads that crash the server or specific clients.To secure your UT2004 server or client and prevent these crashes, implement the following steps: Disable Voice Chat: Mitigate the attack surface entirely by disabling in-game voice chat in your server's configuration by setting bVoiceChatEnabled=False in your UT2004.ini file.'