Playing With Friends, Groups, and Teams: Voice Comms

You do not need to speak
The first thing I want to say is, and this is to head off those who are in a similar situation as I am, you do not have to talk when using voice comms. Your level of enjoyment and team teamwork will skyrocket even if you are just able to listen to what is going on. You do not have to talk!!! Voice Clients generally come with a text chat area. so you can still communicate, although not as often during game. MWO itself has a text chat option which you can utilize too, if you need to.

However, in order for this whole grouping and playing together process to really work at this point, you will need to contact and form a group in another way that is outside of the game. You could use the in game chat with people who are currently your friends, but that is a really annoying. Using a VOIP client will be the best way, especially if you join an organized house/clan that you can play with consistently. Currently, PGI has light integration with the VOIP (voice over internet protocol) client C3. You can start up the C3 client and search for Dropship to find others to play with and form a group with.

Many Clan/Mer Groups have their own VOIP and allow others to jump on to play with them, so you can also contact them to see what their policy is. Start with their a random TS server to find a group, and then you can do the friend adding adding, group joining after that. Keep in mind you do not have to speak while using a VOIP client. You can just listen and then just type in the text chat there, however, some people may not see it. =(

C3 Client
(these links are fixed)

You can download the C3 VOIP Client here. I am not sure how to use the client yet, but I am sure that there are may tutorials out there. If anyone has links to them let me know, or if you have any indispensable advice for using it.

After you have installed this client, and you are in a preformed group (ie not a PUG group), C3 will ,when you drop, popup asking you to join a C3 group (for your drop group). At this time only people with premade groups will have C3 pop-up with a request to join a chat group in C3. Pugs, at this time, are out of luck. At some point in the future this will change, and I really look forward to it. PGI has announced that currently there is only light integration with the C3 client and more is to come.

I will say that I have done a few drops with this client and the voice quality is not as good or consistent as team speak.

Another person has suggested after downloading C3, start it up and search for "Dropship" and then find a group from there.

Here are some notes from Hennessey (from a beta thread) about C3 and how it currently works:


 * Many users (Windows 7?) need to run C3 'As Administrator' for the push to talk function to work. (right click on program shortcut and select "run as administrator").
 * Although it is advertised to create a room for in-game groups, these very often error and close, which leads to:
 * Most folks I've played with on C3 have a public room ( or 5) that they generally stay in.
 * AAAAAAND those who do, tend to check in the 'Official MW:O' room occasionally for any FNGs who are brave enough to give C3 a shot.
 * Related note, you can stay in multiple channels, but simply mute the mouth breathers by clicking on the little speaker icon on the channels tab, and the number of users in the room is displayed next to the name of the room... Just as easy, in most cases, to simply favorite them (the rooms) and check for number of users on the 'Channels:Favorites' tabs
 * There is no integration for PUGs at all. It appears as if this is intended in the future, but who knows.
 * The UI is relatively straight forward; finding channels and favoriting them feels somewhat familiar.
 * C3 has a very simple (limited?) set of options. For some this is a good thing. I found TS to be a config PITA.
 * C3 is actually very stable, and will stay connected even through MW:O client crashes/disconnects.

Team Speak
(these links are fixed)

If you would like to use Team Speak 3, which is a very popular VOIP client you can go here to download TS3. My Merc Groups uses it, and so do many others. I find the interface more intuitive and cleaner, and the voice quality much better than C3.

Chat Servers
In this thread "Unofficial Community Run Voice Chat Servers" you will see a list of TS3 servers that you can use to join a random drop group.