My friends and I all started with Teamspeak 2. This was how we spoke with one another while playing final fantasy XI. We finally got to hear what we sounded like, and we didn’t have to type anymore. When you’re in the midst of a good fight, you’re too busy with your hands on the fighting buttons to worry about typing a message to your friend saying “he’s about to use special attack alpha!” That’s the last thing you need to be worried about. It’s easier, and faster, to just say it out loud.
Our Teamspeak 2 server was one we hijacked… Honestly I have no idea how we got it, or where we found it. We had jumped around all over the place until we found one. It wasn’t hard to run a server off windows, but that meant always leaving your computer on and having the server eat up resources better used for gaming.
After a while, though, the server shut down for no reason, and we had nowhere to go. We had skype that we used for a while, and we rather liked it. Skype was great because whatever I said was heard instantaneously. There was no lag delay based on connection. In Teamspeak 2, I’d say something, and it was heard by everyone a second later. That additional second, while again faster than typing, meant they had to hear it, process it, and react to it in a fight. This was too slow. Skype was our new best friend…
Kinda…
We couldn’t run a “skype server” of any kind, so it wasn’t always up. If you wanted to talk to somebody, you had to send a skype call to them. There is nothing more irritating than seeing skype’s call window popping up over top of everything you’re doing. Sometimes, it even breaks full screen mode of a game you’re playing, which means you die, all because someone wanted to annoy you. It sucks when you’re immersed in a good game, about to complete a challenge that really tried your mental capacity, only to see that damn call popup appear, your fullscreen broken, the game crashed, and they’re still calling…
Annoying as it was, as long as we’d all set up beforehand, we were fine… That is, assuming you never disconnect. The person who initiates the group all with everyone is the person running the “server”. If that person disconnects, everyone disconnects. This means you have to have someone who isn’t on a wireless connection and doesn’t have their bandwidth eaten up by the wife watching netflix.
Thankfully, if someone else disconnects, they can always get back into the group they were part of without a hitch.
Still, overall, this is annoying. It’s a bitch to manage, and it’s annoying to have to work around the X is calling you popup that ruins everything.
Teamspeak 3 had finally been released, and while we liked it, we couldn’t find a server to go to. I had toyed with the idea of just buying a server, but never really bothered.
Then came the release of final fantasy XIV. This game sucked, but we played it anyway. There was one little problem with it though… If you played it full-screen, you could not alt+tab out. That’s right, the jerks at Square-Enix decided to disable alt+tabbing for some stupid reason. If you tried to alt+tab, your game would just crash and come to a halt. This isn’t a bug; this was by design. And that’s really something when you get into the game and start moving around and all of a sudden you see that “someone is calling you“ message from skype, requiring you to shut the game down, answer the call, then boot it all back up again.
There was a borderless window option too, but that cost performance; the game ran smoother in true fullscreen.
So, we closed the game, answered the call, booted the game back up, and… they disconnected because they have crappy internet. Someone is calling you!
I’d had it. I wasn’t sure who I was more angry with… Square-Enix, or Skype, but I knew there was a solution to this frustrating problem.
In teamspeak, if someone joins in, they join into a channel. I get no popup, and nothing is broken. They can come and go as they please, and it doesn’t break any immersion at all.
I’ll go ahead and say it: if you’re using skype as your voice program for gaming, you need to rethink your options. Skype is a resource hog as an ad-spewer, a chat client, and a voip client. All of these things have been done with far less resources. Skype eats up memory and bandwidth needlessly.
I went out and paid for a service from some company. It was less than $2 to rent a teamspeak server for the few people that we had, so I really didn’t care. $2 a month was a lot easier than dealing with skype’s ridiculousness. And everything was fine for us…
Until the service decided to fail a bunch of times. We’d disconnect time and time again, and there was nothing I could do about it. The connection would just fade in and fade out. Sometimes it was just a flicker, and other times it was 10 minutes… and other times it was hours before it came back to life again. I wasn’t having this…
And now comes the part of the story where we get to the point: hosting a teamspeak 3 server on an ubuntu server.
I finally said to myself “hey, I run a designated server for web and minecraft… why not see if i can’t run my own teamspeak server? how freakin hard could it be?”
The short answer is: pretty hard, but easily possible. Again, following directions and reading documentation will save you lots of time.
When you download the server, it’s all zipped up because for whatever reason they can’t find a way to make the server a nicely packaged .deb file. I love .deb files… one command, and everything’s installed where it needs to be.
Once everything’s unzipped, you run the teamspeak startscript. This script is usually titled ts3server_startscript.sh. Run it, and voila, you have a teamspeak server set up for people to connect to. It’s that simple…
Managing the teamspeak server is another story. I couldn’t do a lot of things on the server, even though it said I was an admin. It took me a month of playing with it (yes a month, because I’d lose interest after plucking for 2 hours, then pick it back up again the next day) to finally figure out what the problem was: serverquery.
What is serverquery? I don’t know, and still don’t. From what I can gather it’s the ability to be a super admin to your server. I had to activate myself as a “serverquery admin” in order to change anything I wanted about the server. How was I supposed to know this? Simple: I had to be omnipotent.
I’m sure it’s buried in their ridiculous amounts of documentation, and so many people here will chant “RTFM” but I’m not going to spend time reading a 200-page manual for something. If it takes you 200 pages to write a manual, maybe you should think about how to make it simpler to use. It’s a voip server, not a freakin automobile.
What I needed was a tutorial, and through excessive amounts of googling, I gathered enough to do it.
Back when I first made the server, I could access serverquery through the teamspeak 3 client. This is not the case anymore. Now, I have to telnet to my server and log in that way. Once logged in and code redeemed, I am now the serverquery admin…
Now I can change the server however I like… Yay?
At this point, you’re probably completely lost as to what I’m talking about, and even I can’t follow what I’m saying.
The point is Teamspeak 3 is a pain in the ass to set up, and it’s counterintuitive. Now that it IS set up, I’m not touching it anymore, and my friends don’t have to deal with its annoyances. (Update: I switched to mumble because as I just stated, teamspeak 3 is a pain in the ass.)
(Update 2: Then I switched to Discord because great as mumble was, it didn’t hold a candle to Discord.)
I’ve written a tutorial of my own on how to get Teamspeak 3 running on your ubuntu/debian server, so check it out if you’re confused or want to run one of your own without excessive amounts of googling. I use it as a reference myself.
You want to hear the sad ending of this story? Most of my friends never even log in anymore. One’s deployed in Afghanistan, another is an entrepreneur trying to get his business started, and the last one just works odd hours and goes to bed at the same times we are just getting home. My teamspeak server never gets used anymore.
So goes the tale of the underappreciated server admin… :)