Give us Language Choices and respect them for the next Beta

[Nidome.1365]

19 minutes ago, Dayra.7405 said:

The current BB problem (the server cannot close, as it is the only SP server, and is overstacked due to that) will disappear with alliances anyway.

 

The current BB problem appears to be that a large portion of the population is North & South American as the North American servers have no language specific options.

This means that BB is under populated during the European day and overpopulated at night.

[Dayra.7405]

1 hour ago, Nidome.1365 said:

 

The current BB problem appears to be that a large portion of the population is North & South American as the North American servers have no language specific options.

This means that BB is under populated during the European day and overpopulated at night.

Maybe that one disappears, if there are language preferences in NA as well 😉

But, who cares. I lost any interest in outcome of 24/7 matches a long time ago. Should they get bord in the night, during the day, there are 2 others to play.

Edited December 12, 2021 by Dayra.7405

[gloflop.3510]

I saw the topic from the other side. My main server is an EU-server. I got now thrown into one "World" during the beta with players from all kind of servers. Consequently, the chat was in all kind of languages. There was a bit of Spanish, a bit of French, and if the Germans had a good mood, also German. This as such is rather unproblematic. However, there were also useful information like inc messages in these languages. Also, commanders on voice stayed with their own language instead of switching to English. We tried to make the best out of it and got it a bit working. However, I believe that the playing experience of the players would have been better if they had played on a language-based world.

 

That having said, I would not suggest to implement a language component into alliances straight. My suggestion would rather be to introduce something based on the current experience. We do not need to test e.g. guild linking or similar. We will rather add such changes step by step.

[Nauda.3678]

I think subversiontwo.7501 made some good points about some possible implications if language preferences are going to be used.

It might be fine to use them to determine where to put solo players to a certain degree, so they have an easier time to connect to people with the same language, but if you put too much emphasis on this (especially for guild or even bigger alliances) you risk losing some flexibility in the system regarding balancing coverage.

 

Also if you put too much emphasis on it you kinda recreate language-based servers again which is another problem.

I will use Baruch as an example but you can do the same with german servers or french ones. If most of the current Baruch players would choose "spanish" as their preference and this setting would be the main factor for the creation of worlds that would mean that baruch would basically be recreated in the new system. In theory that sounds fine but it comes with some problems:

 

- if you want to avoid putting non-spanish people on that server you can't make any of the other servers bigger in playernumbers/hours of play/whatever metric you want to use -> all servers would basically need to have the "size" of 1 "New Baruch"

- but that would also mean that "New Baruch" would still be a mostly night-active server that would not be able to compete against other server with more spread out coverage -> this would mean that there is an inherent disadvantage for "New Baruch"

- if you DO put solo players and smaller guilds who didn't choose "spanish" as their preference on "New Baruch" they would be stranded on a predominantly spanish server without even understanding the language -> this would be very frustrating for these players

 

- as mentioned above I think the only real option would be to create smaller chunks of e.g. players with "spanish"-preference and spread these out equally over different servers. This would ensure that these spanish players are not stranded alone on servers without other spanish players. Still that would also mean that they can't avoid interacting with people with different languages so it would only be a "soft preference". People who really only want to use their language would still not be able to do that (which I think is also an impossible wish).

 

No matter what A-Net does, I'm pretty sure that the future of WvW will contain a lot of mixed languages/players and people will have to deal with sometimes not being able to understand everything or having to adapt their callouts for scouting in a way that can be understood by players with other languages.

 

As always: Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

We did that on Abaddon a long time ago and that's the reason why we're one of if not the best german server to be linked with when it comes to language-cooperation (from what we heard from our link partners). We even have some players who don't speak german who joined Abaddon because of it.

Edited December 13, 2021 by Nauda.3678