Submitted by: John Ramirez
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We hadn’t played or hung out together since the last season ended so some of my clan mates and I met at one of the local restaurants for dinner. We played catch up and talked and laughed about how last season ended up. We made it to the finals in class and lost in over time. Second place wasn’t bad and we earned the right to play in the top tier of our league. No more 2nd tier trash talk about us… The reality of it was this game was in the mature stages of it’s life cycle and was on it’s way out. We had decided to move on to the next game but we had lost Benny who used to host our VOIP Server. He was a cool cat but got married and called it quits. I never understood why you would name your kid Benny, but he had a good shot in FPS games (around 32% accuracy) and he had a geared warlock and warrior. (His lock’s DPS was as mad as it gets in the game but he couldn’t tank a bunny rabbit with his warrior if his life depended on it!)

So the aging debate cropped up again….Are we going to go with a Teamspeak Server or a Ventrilo Server? There were 6 of us there and we were split down the middle. Half wanted to go with a Ventrilo Server and half wanted to go with a Teamspeak Server. One or two of us on each side actually had admin and setup experience with each product. The rest were from that bunch that had their opinion about which one they felt was better, didn’t know squat, but could boldly say the other product was and had no technical knowledge to back either product up. We’ll call this group “Category 2″.

So here is our clan all together hanging out and having dinner which happens never even though we are all local; and this…..is the dinner topic of the night. Where was our bonehead leader to help us hash this out and make a decision? He can’t shoot for crap anyway so we always make him the engineer, but he is a great strat guy and he’s also the priest leader in the RPG game we play. Plus he is your undisputed main tank of all main tank healers. In either case he couldn’t make it because he had to study for an exam or some other lame excuse. Alright we’re split down the middle so we order another round of queso, nachos, wings, and start to discuss the pros and cons of each. We quickly determine that Category 2 as we discussed above, didn’t really have an opinion of their own. They just voted for which ever one someone told them was best or what they thought was best because such and such team that was really good used it. So we quickly nullified their votes because they couldn’t even tell you about the interface of either product. They just know that someone gave them an IP address, a port, and a password and they were talking with their teammates. We called them noobs, all laughed, and munched on our appetizers. For the record the 2nd round of appetizers was our dinner because we were stuffed afterwards.

We had a competition at hand and a winner had to be decided. Were we going to go with Ventrilo Server or Teamspeak Server? Category 2 was already eliminated so we only had 3.5 contributors left. We started to discuss the idea of querying the internet for which one was the best but we decided that that would yield millions of results in people expressing opinions on which one was best (read: millions of Category 2). We started listing the pros of each one. Teamspeak Server was easy to set up, permissions were straight forward, had a lot of codecs to choose from, and was an all around solid and stable product. Ventrilo Server had stepped up their game and had come up with a slightly smoother looking interface, had text to computer voice feature if you wanted to mask your voice or you couldn’t speak (this feature always annoyed me), and had a very granular setup so you could tailor your server to host multiple games with multiple rooms per game. “You can do that with Teamspeak Server also!”, I argued. I didn’t want to use Ventrilo Server because I was a die hard Teamspeak Server admin, user, and I wasn’t a fan of the computerized voice that Ventrilo Server used. Teamspeak Server had a hot\important sounding ladies’ voice in it when you or someone else joined the server. Ventrilo Server could use it’s computerized voice to tell you who just joined so you didn’t have to ask. Back and forth we went for almost an hour. This clan has played together for almost 3 years and on our 5th dinner outing together we get snagged up on this topic?!

Teamspeak Server sound sample - Tough to beat!

Ventrilo Server sound sample - Sounds like you are playing the game Myst. You can also choose the robot voice but it pales in comparison to the one above.

Screenshot of Ventrilo client running on Windows Vista.

It seemed that we were at a stalemate and were going to be undecided when Shelly played an evil trump card. “Ventrilo Server gave away a Corvette at Quakecon this year!” she exclaimed. Everyone backed her up and was oohing, ahhing, and agreeing with her. I even lost my 2.5 supporters momentarily in the Corvette gold rush. I needed to implement damage control quick! Somehow 3 of us got tickets to win the Vette in the giveaway so we had a 3 in 200 chance to win but some guy in Houston, Texas won it. “Well none of us won it and it was probably an act of desperation to win over some gamers anyway! Ventrilo Server was probably so far behind in market share that they had to do something drastic like that to compete.”, I retorted. This cooled the flames for the time being, put my 2.5 supporters back on the fence yet still leaning towards the Vette contributor, and sadly earned me some Category 2 points. Most gamers were suspicious of gimmicks and fluff to begin with so this bought me a little time. How could she play that card?! For starters she was a super hot red head with boyfriend, our third best shot shooting around 34%, used to be a member of an all girl clan that used to dominate at LAN events, but her druid was pvp specced which means she couldn’t heal well and her pvp was mediocre anyway. Her boyfriend was terrible at games so he didn’t hang out with us or play with us. He was a chemist or something. Somehow she held some sway over some of our on-the-fence clan members. If I didn’t pull something out of my hat soon we were going to be using a Ventrilo Server and that was that.

I felt like the narrator in the song “Devil went down to Georgia” making a pact with the devil because I was about to pull the trump card of all trump cards out and slap it down on the table. Now if you’re not familiar with this song, I don’t recommend that you go look for it and download it because it’s a genre of music I am not overly proud of but it had a good story. I recommended to the group innocently, “Let’s call Mr. Know-it-all. He can give us the code level technical details of both products and help us decide.” I knew Shelly was trying to use her gaze to turn me into stone but I also knew he would be able to give us all the facts and help us draw the line plus I was wearing my shirt of +12 resist to paralysis. Shelly agreed and encouraged the idea as if it was her own. A few members also agreed that this was the thing to do and a few slowly put their heads down and stared at their plates but agreed. To give you a little background on Mr. Know-it-all who I will refer to as “MKIA” from here on out….MKIA is one of those guys that doesn’t have any college experience at all but earns comfortably over six figures, knows 2-3 programming languages, is an authority in 3-4 major business server products, and has more money and cars\toys than they were giving away at Quakecon - but is mediocre at games. He shoots down in the mid 20s and has zero battle smarts but wants to give out all the orders. You play with him, but pretty much ignore him when he is trying to give direction in-game because you know it’s a bust. However when it comes down to technology, software, and hardware he is the go to person because he makes it his job to know as much as the people who designed the products do. I’m pretty sure that’s his part time job because that’s all he does when he is not at work. When a CIO or CEO of a corporation questions his technical solution and asks who he asks when he doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he replies “I pray”. He’s one of the few people I know that can say something like that to an executive and not get fired.

I give MKIA a ring….of course he can be here in ten minutes. Now the reason a few people hung their head low when MKIA was mentioned is because when there is a topic up for discussion he will talk about it for as long and deep as you let him. Once you’re locked into conversation with him he won’t let you go. He’s got you in his tractor beam and he’s uploading information into your mind as fast as the Matrix front side bus will allow. This isn’t one of those flip-the-switch and get out easily tractor beams either. You have to distract him and casually slip away. MKIA shows up and we tell him what the debate is as he starts in on our appetizers. MKIA explains that both Teamspeak Server and Ventrilo Server operate on the same technology in the sense that they both are VOIP Server products and for all intents and purposes are not very different from each other in function. Then he starts getting deeper and goes over a few of our heads when he goes into hardware overhead, codecs available, features, permissions, clarity of voice, and rambles on for the better part of another hour as he orders another round of food.

Some of the Codecs available in a Teamspeak Server.

Both servers run on Windows, Linux, and the Mac although Teamspeak Server does not have an official release for the Mac it does work. Ventrilo Server has a very versatile setup that allows you to communicate between channels, text to voice, and many other configurable features. While Teamspeak Server does not have quite the same functionality, it is a stable and reliable VOIP Server. It is also very easy to setup and configure for a server administrator or user. When you put them both on the stand head to head, they are virtually the same product. You just have to decide if you want to spend your time playing with the features in the client or use the client to talk to your teammates while playing a game. Teamspeak Server as stated above overall is slightly easier to use and navigate. At the end of the day MKIA explains that it is a matter of preference as both of these products are very high quality and can be tailored to meet a variety of needs. The factor that tips the scale in favor for Teamspeak Server is the wide array of server or client side codecs that can be configured. With high bandwidth connections quickly becoming available all over the world, you can find yourself playing with others in Australia, Brazil, the UK, Israel, Russia, and wherever else you can think of. Those with fast remote connections will still encounter latency when connecting to your location but you can configure the codecs to meet their needs and still be able to hear each other with clarity. So the dark horse Teamspeak Server edges ahead and comes out on top. MKIA continued to ramble on and on while he finished all the food and we voted on and chose Teamspeak Server as our solution. It was a relief to have finally decided and it was also a relief that MKIA finally stopped talking. Matter of fact, somewhere during the voting process he had quietly slipped out and stuck us with the bill for the food he ordered too. Morale of the story as it were from our perspective? Play your trump cards carefully and go with Teamspeak Server!