Shotcalling in Albion Online: Voice Setup for ZvZ and CTAs

Albion Online is one of the few MMOs where the shotcaller is a named, respected role. In practice a zerg is split into parties of up to 20 players, the caller leads all of them at once, and everyone is expected to hold their engage until the call. The catch is on the Discord side: one voice can only sit in one channel, so guilds either cram a 100-player CTA into a single chaotic channel or the caller is heard by one party only. A voice relay solves this: each party keeps its own channel, and the shotcaller is heard in all of them at the same time.

How Albion fights are actually organized

• Parties cap at 20 players (19 members plus a leader), so any zerg is several parties fighting as one body.
• ZvZ scales from roughly 25v25 skirmishes to 150v150+ blobs; a contested zone holds up to 350 players in total, and a big CTA can mobilize far more across neighboring zones and the queue.
• Guilds cap at 300 members and combine into formal alliances, so alliance CTAs routinely field multiple full parties per guild.
• One shotcaller leads the whole zerg. When allied zergs fight together, their callers coordinate in a separate voice channel of their own.

The comms problem at CTA scale

Put five parties of 20 into one Discord channel and every ability call competes with a hundred people breathing, pinging and panicking. Split them into five channels and the shotcaller reaches only one of them. Discord has no native way to broadcast one voice into several channels; every account, including a bot, can occupy exactly one voice channel per server. That limitation, not the caller's skill, is usually what makes large fights messy.

How to set it up on Discord

dcshot is a voice relay service for Discord, built for MMO raid callouts. Setup for an Albion guild takes minutes in the web dashboard:

• Create a voice channel per party (Party 1 to Party 5, or per-role squads).
• Add the relay bots: one bot covers one party channel, up to 16 per Discord server.
• Mark your shotcaller; optionally mark an info caller per party whose voice reaches only the caller's room, so scouting reports flow up without spamming the zerg.
• Players just join their party channel. Nothing to install, no second app.

For alliance CTAs, dcshot can share voice across up to four allied Discord servers, so one caller can lead parties sitting on their own guilds' Discords.

When you don't need a relay

Small-scale content (Crystal League 5v5, gank squads, a single 20-player party) fits in one shared channel just fine. A relay starts paying off when two or more parties need their own comms and still have to hear one caller, which in Albion terms means ZvZ, territory battles and castle fights.

Facts worth knowing