Voice chat
| “ | May I borrow your earpiece? "This is Scout! Rainbows make me cry! Over!"
— The Spy to the late Scout
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” |
Voice chat (default key: v for PC) is an in-game feature that can be used by those with a microphone to help coordinate tactics and strategies. Voice chat on the Xbox 360 is activated simply by plugging in your headset into your controller. On the Playstation 3 you can have the option of buying a wireless blutooth earpiece.
When a player is using voice chat, a speaker icon appears above the players head. Also, a bar appears on the middle right side of the HUD to both the player and his teammates, displaying which player is currently speaking.
By default voice chat can only be heard by your own team, but can be heard by all players on servers with sv_alltalk set to "1". The talk to everyone feature is not available on the Xbox 360 version. Voice chat is limited as text chat is by death: while you are waiting to respawn, only other dead teammates will hear your voice chat.
On the PC version, voice chat is commonly augmented via third-party programs such as Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Using these solutions allow the player to bypass the death limitation on voice chat and still coordinate with teammates while awaiting respawn. One noteworthy combination of Team Fortress 2 and third-party voice chat would be a clan practice match where the server would be set to alltalk while the two teams would be in their own third-party voice channels. This would allow for public pre- and post-game discussion and in-game private coordination.
Uses of Voice chat
Most situations where faster-than-keyboard or long and detailed communication is needed, such as:
- Warning of incoming enemies.
- Coordinating with a medic buddy (or vice versa) without having to resort to the default voice phrases, or text chat (great for telling the medic when to activate his ÜberCharge).
- Coordinating an attack with a group of other players.
- Rooting out disguised spies.
- Telling people the exact location of the intelligence.
- Calling for backup.
- Indicating the locations of enemy sentry guns and other buildings.
