As we planned at the last community meeting and discussed first more than six months ago we are shutting down the Teamspeak server and moving to Mumble.
Why?
Restrictive Licencing
For the last three plus years that we’ve hosted a Teamspeak server we have been operating using Teamspeak’s ‘non-profit license’ a license that is unrelated to the global business definition of non-profit and instead just prevents us handling money in any way, including just to cover community costs. A fact that is unpopular with a lot of communities:
Many of you may be unaware but running servers 24/7 is not cheap, especially when you’re popular enough to need to defend against DDOS attacks frequently, as we did last year. With the Teamspeak agreement hanging over out heads we’re both not allowed to even think about covering community costs nor would we be able to monetise any Twitch or YouTube channels in the future, we’d be in limbo.
It’s also worth mentioning that Teamspeak DRM is extremely strict and locks us to 1 IP which requires approval to change (a major source of downtime in the past when we needed to move servers) and performs constant check-ins which forcefully shutdown the server if they are unable to connect for even a few minutes (another source of downtime in the past).
Mumble beats Teamspeak
Leaving Teamspeak is not something many of us are doing lightly, its been our home for well over three years now and we’re all familiar with it… however to set the records straight Mumble is equal or better than Teamspeak in every way other than cosmetically:
-
Voice Quality: Mumble uses the exact same audio codec as Teamspeak and therefor exactly matches it in audio quality.
-
Latency: Mumble and Teamspeak 3 both match each other on latency (an important quality for voice communication) though some attest to Mumble even reducing latency.
-
Footprint: Though both are lightweight enough to cause no problems, Mumble uses less than half the memory Teamspeak does and and beats it on almost all other measures.
-
Security: Teamspeak is closed source and as such though they do claim to implement strong encryption there is no was for us to check such a claim or prevent it being backdoored. Mumble on the other hand is open source and makes use of TLS and modern encryption, it clearly beats Teamspeak on security.
-
In-Game Overlay: Teamspeak forces you to install Overwolf, Mumble has their own overlay built in that with minimal configuration can be used in most games.
-
Looks: Yes Mumble looks slightly older and uglier than Teamspeak, but is no harder to navigate because of that. It uses the same channel tree based design just without the nice banner on the right taking up inordinate amounts of space.
How can I use Mumble?
We currently have a Mumble server online for testing purposes. Just download it from here and join at the IP: voice.thesentinelalliance.net (same process as Teamspeak).
More guides will follow when we’re officially switching, until then, wait and watch.
Goodbye?
Though we’ve enjoy the majority of our time on Teamspeak we’re not going to say goodbye because we’re not going anywhere, we’re simply transitioning to Mumble and we hope you’ll all come with us.
The move to Mumble is a step in the right direction. Another step towards protecting the privacy of everyone in this community and being able to expand in the future.