kAoS

Epic did wonders with this after seeing what makes Roger Wilco and Teamspeak great. This is probably the most useful feature ever implimented in an online multiplayer game. It's great.

Unfortunantly, this feature so far though has not been appealing. Why? Because first of all nobody uses it, in an onslaught game of 24 people you'll be lucky to find 2 people who will talk to you. Second of all, people must think its fagg0try or something. Someone on my team in Onslaught voiced out as i was driving by in a Hellbender "Help me repair this node". So I voiced back and agreed. 10 seconds later another teammate types "Omg you two are using voicechat assault the base homo's".

Conclusion:
Voice chat in private/clan/lan = godsend
Voice chat in public servers = low credibility, easily targeted for flaming by geeks who are too scared to plug in their microphones and use verbal communication.

I reckon voice chat is alot better u can tell wat ur team mates excactly wat u want or need them to do & where u r. thats wat makes a team win <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>COMMUNICATION</span>

to my situation here, I use voice all the time... in my opinion, there will be no more text typing in games, the game also comes with a free bonus mic headset if u pre-order it, they are going to get around it so everyone whoes anyone will be voice chatting in the near future gameing... Also I came accross, when u text, it says it out loud, this feature wasent very good in my case, cause I hate dickheads who type anything just so they can hear it back to themselves. I mean u type, good game ppl, etc, wd.. ppl typing shit like asdasdadasda... hahaha.. GANGSTA GANGSTA, LITen to my voice PPL.. haha abcdefg 32156521316831532, just laggen up the voice return... Silly little imature people... All in well, the game rocks!

Just so people know what they're doing when they use 2004's voice chat...

This is said in the UT2004 manual:

Each UT2004 game contains a several standard voice chat channels:

Public — All players on the server may join and transmit.

Local — All players on the server may join and transmit to this channel.

The local channel is a new concept in voice chat technology.
Any transmissions sent to this channel will be “broadcasted” from your
player’s location in the current match. All players within range of your
player’s location in the map can hear your transmission. The further
away another player is from you, the lower your voice will sound.
Local broadcasts are fully supported by 3D audio systems, meaning you
are able to discern from which direction a player’s voice came.

Team — Only hear transmissions from your teammates.

This is a cascading channel, meaning that any communication sent to this channel will also be heard in the Offense and Defense channels.

In addition to the standard channels on every UT2004 server, a personal chatroom is created when you join the server. Other players may join your personal chat room to speak in private. To prevent unauthorized persons from joining your personal chat channel, you have the option of protecting your personal chat channel with a password. You can set the password in the Voice Chat configuration page of the Settings menu.