What is vent?

[HKemhorns]

So I'm an old man.......

...but I was playing Half Life 2 Deathmatch and some kid that is in the friends of my high school age nephew hits me on Xfire and asks me if he can use my Steam account to talk to a friend about "money and stuff to pay for vent."

What the hell is he talking about? I was worried that he was into huffing or something, but he later told me I could use his vent channel.

I declined. What was this guy up to?

 

[scottsins]

Ventrilo.

Now, that's the extent of my knowledge on this.

google should help you.

 

[TexasOwnzYou]

counterstrike (both 1.6 and source) comes with in game voice apps so u can talk to others while playing. however, while playing matches (in almost all the leagues), the voice convo is cut off when u die. so, you use a 3rd party program to talk after u're dead. this is what ventrilo/roger wilco/team speak is. it's legal and almost everyone that plays in leagues uses it.

vent works the same way as irc. u have servers, then channels. you can buy a server with so many slots (# of people that can connect to it at once). it's not that expensive and running a server is easy. we easily run a vent server on UT resnet when we're playing matches. even after matches, u can just have vent running for people to chit chat etc... if u have a real server.

xfire can show your vent server status in your contact window.

 

[hellbunny]

FYI: Letting someone you don't trust have your steam account is a great way to get banned from the Steam network/Valve games.

 

[HKemhorns]

I wasn't considering letting him use my account (not that I even know how). I was more concerned that a friend of my nephew might be into something extremely stupid.

.....so how could someone use another account and what would they do with it?

 

[TexasOwnzYou]

if you let him borrow your account ,he could (download) play the games on your package. this is completely legal. it will log him off from steam when you log on and vice versa. only 1 person can log on at a time.

the kicker here is that if he does something stupid (like hack

), he'll be banned from playing anymore games on secure servers. but there's no vac2 yet though, but it's coming.

 

[hellbunny]

If he does anything illegal (cheat, play a pirated valve game, etc.) with your account it'll be deactivated along with any serials/cd-keys associated with the account.