Saturday 18 August 2007

Voice? Bah

I've never been a proponent of Voice. Not because I have any fear of playing a male AV that I'm actually a woman. And people who have attended events where I've DJ'd have heard my voice (with some even swooning over the accent. What accent I say?).

Mainly it's an issue of personal preference. While Edward is not a roleplayed AV he is certainly a theme one. And while I can do a passable London accent, and easily a BBC English, my Scots accent drifts. But I also know the effect of a midwestern American drawl on people supposedly being aristocratic English residents or deep northern fishwife tones on delicate pixies.

That and from my perspective it tends to attract far to many of the iWank crowd from what I've seen. Ooooh shiny! Yes voice has it's uses. But I think inventory problems and client stability should be far higher on the agenda than all the bells and whistles. That and there are some people on the grid who have enough trouble stringing a coherent sentence together using the writing word. It may be highly snobbish of me but I'm not really sure I want to hear their blatherings, thanks all the same.

Sheriff Ortega sums up his most recent frustration here.

And personally I've also logged a bug at not being able to turn off voice on my parcels. Go here and vote.

2 comments:

Hotspur O'Toole said...

But I also know the effect of a midwestern American drawl on people supposedly being aristocratic English residents or deep northern fishwife tones on delicate pixies.

There it is in a nutshell for me. I play a role with a very distinctive ethnic trait.. now, I can probably do a passable Irish accent for a while (many of my older relatives where native born), but I know I will ultimately grow lazy or tired or be distracted and whisst, no accent, and no character. I don't wish to be another bland American accent among the multitude. I'm opposed to voice because I feel it robs strongly themed sims like Caledon, Babbage, and even Western towns like Tombstone of their unique theme identification.

TotalLunar Eclipse said...

Last night after about the second remapping of Steelhead Tensai & I became fed up and disabled voice to the entire island. To our little shock suddenly the island was taking up fewer processing power.

After the third remapping when the island was back online it was once again enabled and we could not turn it of. We have filed three tickets on this and I'm sure when Tensai is feeling less nauseous this evening she will come in, find a linden and chew their bloody heads off.

It has been my opinion that there is something uniquely lost when you break down the SL barrier to RL as well as having to 'hear' some folks when they obviously lack the skills to speak decently to another human being.