Blizzard,
Please admit that in order to make your voice chat work that you took a short cut and only allowed a software driver for sound. Please revert this change and put off voice chat and allow us to use hardware acceleration again. My sound is terrible now and I can't hear half the sounds I used to. I've got through the trouble shooting and it's still terrible. I hate the way this game sounds now.

edit: http://i24.tinypic.com/2uoh2br.jpg

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Q u o t e:
Blizzard,
Please admit that in order to make your voice chat work that you took a short cut and only allowed a software driver for sound. Please revert this change and put off voice chat and allow us to use hardware acceleration again. My sound is terrible now and I can't hear half the sounds I used to. I've got through the trouble shooting and it's still terrible. I hate the way this game sounds now.

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100% agree.

Voice chat is the reason for the sound engine change.

Voice chat sucks and isnt needed....people have been getting along just fine using stuff like Vent or Teamspeak just fine...and its by choice.

Get rid of voice chat...put back hardware sound and go work on stuff that is actually needed/wanted by the customers.

This new sound system is terrible and the removal of hardware acceleration was a huge mistake, but don't count on the Dev's acctually admiting they made a mistake and restore it anytime soon.

There was a blue post in the tech services forum last night that stated there is only about 10% of the players experiencing problems due to the new patch and implied that that was an insignificant number (can't locate the post, but due to the direction the thread was going was probably deleted.) 10% is insignificant? That's 1/10 of the player base, 900,000 players?

Speak with your wallet, I did, 10/20 is when my account expires - hopefully they'll see the light and restore hardware acceleration before then. I enjoy this game, but the problems introduced with this patch is not worth paying for.

I agree, it sounds pretty bad. And that's not a healthy direction for a 3 year old game to take. You want improvements in patches, not regression. Slower game, crappier sound is not a way to say "play our improving game!"

I just want my game to be as good as it was. right now it's not

Have you tried updating your sound drivers? The game works fine on my array of systems. X-fi, Audigy 2 ZS, Live, and craptasticular laptop sound card.

P.S. "you're"

As I understand 2.2 was on Test for a while...in fact longer than most patches....held up from going live mostly due to Voice Chat related issues....

so it goes live this week....completely full of bugs, sound engine that just plain sucks...there really is no better way to describe it.

What exactly was tested on Test for all those weeks?

Voice Chat was not needed...nor even wanted by players. I can probably scour the forums and come up with a list of 20 issues/bugs that should have been priority over putting in Voice Chat...and reverting the games once excellent sound to 1990 technology.

Obvious that the switch to crappy software sound engine is because of Voice Chat.

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Q u o t e:
Have you tried updating your sound drivers? The game works fine on my array of systems. X-fi, Audigy 2 ZS, Live, and craptasticular laptop sound card.

P.S. "you're"

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Yes...actually the gmae "works fine" on my system as well..

But working fine and sounding good are two different things.

It sounds like crap compared to before. It literally took WoWs once excellent sound, sound effects and positional sound queues back at least 2 generations.

And as you mention..you have 3 different sound setups....my biggest beef with these changes is that it sounds equally crappy on all three of those....shouldn't the X-Fi system sound much better than the craptasticular laptop sound card ?

Voice chat will always be the biggest WTF!? in the history of wow. At this point in the game's lifecycle it was an unnecessary feature and had no chance of being implemented in a streamlined way. It's a complete hackjob and it shows, round peg square hole, fixing something that wasn't broke, etc.

Honestly, why does everyone who's bashing the ingame Voice chat, have to sound like they're speaking for everyone on all servers..

To start let me make it clear that I'm am not a child saying this but a 24 year old...sharing my opinion.

I am looking forward to using voice chat, mainly because I am a vocal person who finds it easier to tell my party/guild mates something rather than typing it out. True there are other services out there to use, but honestly if I can be offered something to use that is included amongst my subscription which I'm already paying rather than just another subscription I need to have then I'm more than happy to take advantage of the "Free" service....

So please can you Ingame Voice chat haters, stop acting like you speak for everyone?

OK, just convince Microsoft to enable hardware sound in DX10 (Vista) and we should be all fine.

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Q u o t e:
Honestly, why does everyone who's bashing the ingame Voice chat, have to sound like they're speaking for everyone on all servers..

To start let me make it clear that I'm am not a child saying this but a 24 year old...sharing my opinion.

I am looking forward to using voice chat, mainly because I am a vocal person who finds it easier to tell my party/guild mates something rather than typing it out. True there are other services out there to use, but honestly if I can be offered something to use that is included amongst my subscription which I'm already paying rather than just another subscription I need to have then I'm more than happy to take advantage of the "Free" service....

So please can you Ingame Voice chat haters, stop acting like you speak for everyone?

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Voice Chat would be fine if they had implemented/designed it into the game from the start....its pretty obvious given all the bugs and related issues with the new sound engine that this was nothing more than a major hackjob.

Honestly I am pissed about the new crapp sound engine..not Voice Chat...it just happens that they are related.

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Q u o t e:


Yes...actually the gmae "works fine" on my system as well..

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By working fine, I mean...

works just like before the patch. In fact, it seems to have fixed a few issues for me. I've never been able to hear Silvanas' Lament of the Highborne before unless I typed in the command to play it.

All 6 channels work beautifully, and I have not experienced any "dropped" sounds or "cut off" sounds.

Granted, all I do nowadays is PVP, so maybe Illidian's foot steps are non-existant in black temple, I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't care.

And yes, the X-fi system sounds much better than my laptop. Just like said same system looks better on my 32" display than my laptop's 17" display. My point was, they both function the same as before 2.2.

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Q u o t e:
Honestly, why does everyone who's bashing the ingame Voice chat, have to sound like they're speaking for everyone on all servers..

To start let me make it clear that I'm am not a child saying this but a 24 year old...sharing my opinion.

I am looking forward to using voice chat, mainly because I am a vocal person who finds it easier to tell my party/guild mates something rather than typing it out. True there are other services out there to use, but honestly if I can be offered something to use that is included amongst my subscription which I'm already paying rather than just another subscription I need to have then I'm more than happy to take advantage of the "Free" service....

So please can you Ingame Voice chat haters, stop acting like you speak for everyone?

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Actually, if you really read what the previous posters posted, they're not bashing the concept of built-in VOIP, they're bashing the way its been gone about.

In other words, since its being added so late in the product's life, its just that: an add-on. And because the way they're doing it makes all other sounds drop in quality (software driver, which drains system resources) its not nearly as good as options already out there for people, via 3rd parties. On top of all that, because they're spending all this time and money bungling this project, they're not spending time on things more people would like: actual new in-game content.

I'd also like to add its absolutely ridiculous that a game that generates this much income AND has a PTS can still have patches coming out which do not work, 3 years after launch. It defies logic that programming this shoddy is going live when there's a PTS to test these things on prior to going live.

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Q u o t e:


By working fine, I mean...

works just like before the patch. In fact, it seems to have fixed a few issues for me. I've never been able to hear Silvanas' Lament of the Highborne before unless I typed in the command to play it.

All 6 channels work beautifully, and I have not experienced any "dropped" sounds or "cut off" sounds.

Granted, all I do nowadays is PVP, so maybe Illidian's foot steps are non-existant in black temple, I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't care.

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The list of specific sounds that sound worse is too long....one of my biggest complaints about the new sound is related too "positional" queues.....before it was quite well...you could tell where something was by sound....not only that but the transition in positional queues worked well...

Example would be standing near a fire and turning around in a circle....I could close my eyes and know exactly where the fire was in relation to my toon....today that is not the case..it just snaps from in front to the right to the back to the left and back to the front...no true spacial transition.

So that's why WoW went from sounding awesome, to sounding really really REALLY bad? (it works, but you can't really call it working when it just is such a step backwards).

I run surroundsound, and it's just so nice to hear things like they are REALLY far away, or like they are 3 inches from my ear (sarcasm). Really, it was GREAT before, now it's horrid.

Yeah.. as much as I would have liked voice chat, I liked a great sounding game MUCH MORE.

I REALLY hope you guys realize the new system sucks.. cause if this is the way it's going to stay, the sound is going to have to stay muted out on my system (which I've NEVER done with any game before, I've ALWAYS had sound turned on).

I mean I can't even stand next to the auctioneer in Thunderbluff because it sounds like the windmill is RIGHT IN MY EAR. (I've tried numerous things to adjust it, nothing has worked yet - again worked perfect before, horrible now)

I mean, I UNINSTALLED VISTA because the sound sucked, but now we're regressing WoW to that system now too?

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Q u o t e:
Blizzard,
Please admit that in order to make your voice chat work that you took a short cut and only allowed a software driver for sound. Please revert this change and put off voice chat and allow us to use hardware acceleration again. My sound is terrible now and I can't hear half the sounds I used to. I've got through the trouble shooting and it's still terrible. I hate the way this game sounds now.

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OMG is that what happened?

My sound is total CRAP since the patch! COMPLETELY AWFUL.

So how do I figure out how to fix this mess? If sound is now somehow driven by software, what do I have to update to make it not suck? I'm dying here.

Well I can hear stuff in the game better (like sounds I've never heard before), but I can't hear Vent worth a crap now.

What is even more amazing is that there are people actually using Vista.

I just read an article where even Microsoft is now allowing OEM's to offer its customers that bought computers with Vista pre-installed an option to "upgrade" to Windows XP.

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Q u o t e:
OK, just convince Microsoft to enable hardware sound in DX10 (Vista) and we should be all fine.

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WTF reason is there that anyone would want to use vista anyway - its like using wow on patch day all the time - yes right now vista sucks that bad