I think it’s a great idea really. It’s just not for me. When I first started playing MMORPGs I wasn’t even aware of things like TeamSpeak, Vent, etc. I did quite a bit of roleplaying back then and I find that easier to pull off and much more entertaining when in text. I do like to be immersed in these mmorpgs and I definitely see how services like Vent could detract from that immersion, and even ruin it completely. Personally, I enjoy the escapist element of mmorpgs, and I find that, like a few others have noted, using voice chat brings it a little too far out of that realm for me.

I log in to be someone other than myself in a world that’s nothing like the one I actually live in. That’s a very big part of the whole thing. I don’t much like to chat about out-of-game stuff because it breaks character. Consequently, I can’t see me using voice chat.

Although, whatever happened to the “voice masks” that were promised back when EQ2 introduced voice? As I remember, we were suposed to get all kinds of fantasy race stereotype filters to make us sound like our characters. If they ever add those, then I might use it – although it would need to be set on my client, so that I could adjust all the voices I heard to match the races I was seeing.