"if one of the responses to this is 'well both sides should just do it', I'd like to say that's about as ridiculous as saying teamstacking can be fixed by just magically becoming exponentially better than the round before." =(

I remember that discussion, I was against it's use on our public servers then, my opinion on it hasn't changed since. Unfortunately, there's not enough room on the welcome screen to say "We use teamspeak during rounds for SL to SL communication." Any random person joining the game who doesn't visit our oftens regularly is probably going to think "o, they have a TS server, that's nice" and not think anymore about it.

Also the alt+tab crash still effects many people, including me. If I forget to load TS before I join TG servers, I'm not going to disconnect just to load up TS. Usually by the time someone sees the welcome screen, they're past the point where the alt+tab crash is too much of a hassle to bother loading TS.

I'd just like to reiterate a quote from our primer:

2) Create an environment where there is mutual respect for your fellow gamers and where all members would be working together to advance the enjoyment of their hobby.

If one's idea of "environment where there is mutual respect for your fellow gamers and where all members would be working together to advance the enjoyment of their hobby." includes an environment in which you do whatever it takes to win including using a 3rd party program to bypass a limitation of the game to give your team an advantage that the other team most likely can't use... "fellow gamers" includes the pubbies that join our server, not just the regulars that visit our forums and know about this.

Unless I'm participating in some form of competition play, I won't be using this. If the previous discussion on this is any indication of how this will go, then this may be a one man stand against this, but I'm ok with that.



Negative analysis aside. I think that in theory, the idea of SL-SL communication has potential to be great and offer an entirely new level of gameplay. I can imagine in large-scale competition play having SLs able to hear each other, would speed communication up. In that aspect though, you might as well just have each team entirely in its own channel. If we're going to remove the SL<->CO<->SL voip, why not remove the SM<->SL<->CO voip while we're at it. Have SL<->SM for squad stuff, and use in-game CO<->SL for giving orders to specific squads that others don't need to hear. But otherwise having a way to go from CO straight to all the SMs would remove the need for SLs to relay orders. On a team of SMs who are capable of SLing, having the CO being able to talk to everyone will drastically increase team-wide reaction time.



And for a potential contribution. Having entire teams in their own channels would make this idea alot better. For starters, most people on TS should be fairly evenly split between the teams, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem. The logic behind using "Team1" "Team2" instead of "EU" and "PAC" was that you could stay in the channel, which means those using the channels aren't expected to go to the lobby between rounds. So seeing as autobalance is off, and people aren't going to be changing teams often, why not have teams in their own channels?