Guild Wars 2

I’m in Venezuela, but I usually prefer to do my gaming in english. This is specially true on MMOs, since almost everyone I know speaks english, and I usually don’t like translated names anyway (I prefer how “shiverpeaks” sound to “picoescalofriante”, for example, and that goes to most translated names).

Thing is, anytime I try to go to the guildwars2.com website it seems to use a very strict geolocation that defaults to spanish everytime, with no way to change it to english. The forums do this as well, but there’s an option on the top right to change languages, plus if I go to forum-en.guildwars.com instead of forum.guildwars2.com (which redirects me to forum-es.guildwars.com) it leaves me in the english version of the forums.

No such options on the website, there are no controls to switch languages, and if I try to change the “es” bit of any guildwars2.com URL to “en” it redirects me back to the “es” version, and if I try to go to www.guildwars2.com/en/, it sends me instead to www.guildwars2.com/es/en, of course to the “page not found” site. It has come to the point that anytime I want to see a news item about GW2, I just look for somewhere else with the sign. I don’t mind reading it in spanish, of course, but I find it a little annoying when I read something about “el Arco del León” and takes me a few secs to figure out it means “Lion’s Arch”, for example, not to mention some regionalisms that also make it a little harder for me to understand than if I read it in english. The word “Sudadera” (sweater), for example, in the news about the new gem store items, is a word that it’s commonly used in Mexico… but not in other parts of latinamerica (we just calle it sweater here in Venezuela, though some people write it as they hear it so it ends up being written something like “sueter”).

Please reconsider this choice. Safari for example doesn’t have separate language options, it always defaults to the system language, and if it doesn’t work in other browsers either wouldn’t it be time to look for a different solution?
At least stop the redirection if I chose a specific language option in the URL, or put the language selector from the forums on the main site too.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

The website is actually redirecting you based on your browser language, not geolocation.

If you add English to your browser languages in the browser’s settings, it won’t auto-redirect you to the Spanish site. This has been tested as working on Chrome, but not Firefox.

Cool, works for me with Chrome, thanks for the tip. Those redirects are sometimes broken unfortunately, like in this case.

Thank you for the answer, I was looking for a solution for this, too. Adjusting the brower solved the problem.

However, I think it would be a good idea to re-consider this localization since it seems to cause a lot of confusion and minor issues. Or at least add the EN / FR / DE / SP option to the Main Website too, so people are able to at least switch, with a single click, to the language they prefer. Please consider this, I am sure the community will be grateful for it.

The EN / FR DE /ES choice that is present in the forum would be a great addition for the main website. Inferring the desired language from the browser language is only OK if the user has a choice to change away from that, IMHO.

This really grind my gears. I live in Germany but as many others here I play in English for various reasons. I use Safari on a otherwise German system, so whenever I want to read a short story that is promoted in my launcher, I am forced to read it in German, where I don’t get all the hints to the game.

So the choices for me are: Change the language of the whole system, change the browser or read it on other sites.
Why can’t ANet implement a simple function that every international site calls it’s own?