Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer

There's always hope. To fix all these things, all you need is time and resources and determination. And we've certainly got the last one of those three. But the big issue with VoIP is the amount of testing time, the amount of repro time it takes. And we've spent days attempting to reproduce these issues and either have no success, or they just work, or we've not been able to track down what is causing these issues. We do continue to look into it. And it is always on our plan to improve, because we want it to be a 100% reliable system that people feel they can go to and not need to fall back to third-party chat applications and things like that. So yes, absolutely, we do continue to look into it. And over the last year, we've made some huge stability improvements. From what people are saying, it's not quite there yet. But that's the problem: we fix the big issues, and then you get to the smaller ones and the smaller ones. The deeper you go, the longer it takes to get to the point where you can figure out what's happening before you can fix it. And the thing about the VoIP system, and VoIP as a whole, is it's a hugely complex infrastructure that goes way beyond just recording some voice in game and passing it down to the game server and then propagating it to other players. We have completely separate voice servers that don't even rely on you being on the same game server. So when server meshing comes online and your friend's on a completely different server and they're transitioning between servers, this is all infrastructure we've built that allows that to happen. So you can still communicate when you're transitioning between different servers. So we have all this complexity that was very forward-thinking. And some of this complexity is part of the reason why some of these bugs exist. But it's the right thing to do, because long term we ultimately end up with a system that satisfies our future needs as well as our present ones.