Game video/voice, Non streaming

[Mysteria_Sdrassa]

I was wondering what everyone uses to connect with other players for thier personal groups. Does skype video conferance calling work ok for this? Or are there better services? I am a bit leary about using zoom upon seeing all the bad press on thier security issues right now. I am not really concerned about it needing a streaming service because it don't plan on broadcasting or recording because i dont plan on posting to youtube or any of that stuff right now.. maybe in the future,but not now. I just need something for my personal friends to use while we game in this era of social distancing
Thanks in advance for any help/sugestions :)

[LordEntrails]

Skype works ok but most people don't recommend it. Their is a community Teamspeak server you can use for free. Though the most common right now is Discord. It's free and easy to setup your own 'server' and create channels and such.

[RunningHill]

Not used it yet but Discord just said to me that they allowed video on servers now. I'm not overly concerned about Zooms security but more that I have to pay if I want to host more than 40 minutes.

[Mysteria_Sdrassa]

thanks for the info guys :)

[DrakosDJ]

We use Discord for our games. Been doing so since before the Corvid-19 self quarantine.

[DK1138]

We have been using (and I'm going to shield myself for this one!) facebook video chat because, lets face it, everyone has it. We'll probably move onto something else in the future but a few sessions in and it's working for us. Most of the time we just do voice only and security isn't an issue because it's already pervading our lives completely as it is.

[Mysteria_Sdrassa]

Weeellllllll, not everyone, ha ha :) Sorry, I just have a personal aversion to FB and dont use it, I just find it a toxic environment and steer clear of it. Not saying you should as well, because we all can make our own choices, and if your happy with it thats great :)

[vaughnlannister]

We use discord too, but we find the audio quality drops, if we all start to video-call, so we usually only use audio. I've heard good things about the new google services, https://duo.google.com/about/, https://meet.google.com, were going try these in our next session, I'll let you know how it went :)!

[Mysteria_Sdrassa]

that would be great vaughn, thanks... i wonder if the google partnered with duo lingo for the duo google.. would be interesting to find out because i love duolingo.. i learned German and some basic russian using it :)
also, thanks to everyone else for all the suggestions :)

[Mytherus]

Discord. My discord server is purpose built for our rpg games (i run 2 games a separate dm runs 1 game)...it works very well for us. Each game gets its own channels if you aren't a player for that game you have no rights to its channels..we share in-character interactions outside of play sessions...post files as needed etc. Been using it about 2 years no desire to change it.

[vaughnlannister]

Hi, we tried google meet, last Monday, the video-quality and audio was very good, would highly recommend it, I suspect similar results can be achieved when using google.duo but we didn't test that. At the moment were sticking with discord, but that is only because I use sound ambience from youtube and sound effects which I can only stream through discord. Only thing with google meet is that, you only have 1hr session unless you have a special google account in which you pay for extra google storage.