Guild Wars 2

Im waiting 3 years when this miracle will happend.Im kittened up to explain newbie players from Russia,Ukraine and other slavs country`s some specific of game.Im not asking about full localisation,but we cant use our guild chat normally.Its not a big deal write smt like “fotm lvl 50 1 spot” for players ,who already know this game,but when you try to explain newbie player,which didnt install voice chat yet,some complex things about game mechanic ->its looks like “Esli tebe nrav9tc9 classi kotorie ispolzuyt DoTi ,togda ly4she podoidet necr/eng/ranger.Ele yniversalniy v etom plane.4ustih heal klassov ili tankov tyt net.Vse mogut bit dd/tank/heal v zavisimosty ot builda/yklona,no opredelenniy sklonnosty vse ge imeytc9”. .Also its looks like disrecpect/discrimination. Thanks for reading that.

I want a Zulu localisation, else it’s a discrimination against my tribe. And my fellow african neighbours want it too, so please offer localisation for the 500 or so dialects that are spoken in my region, else we’ll feel disrespected and we’ll riot.

Full localisation is expensive,but add cyrilic symbols in chat for normal communication->its not a big deal.Even my europe friends dont understand that.(why they cant do it or dont want to do it?)

Valee that is not comparable. The cyrillic community is not insignificant. Berzal is not asking for translation / voice work. It’s just for chat.

+1 to op.

Yeah, I can only imagine how this would make the game more enjoyable for you guys. I’m happy we don’t have to go through the trouble to chat like that !

On the other hand there is also a big chance the game will be spammed with cyrillic and thus people might ask for Russian only servers or something like that. Since having to look at cyrillic chat or names ain’t fun for us either….

Russian/Ukraine/USSR community is not big right now.Its lesser then it was on release,but with HoT announce many new people start playing in this game and smt its hard to explain or answer on question fast.We dont need only Russian server or smt. like that.Just cyrilic symbols for normal communication.Right now you can find German or French symbols which is not pure English and its ok/its good and im happy for you guys.I just want to communicate with people from my own country.For example in my 1 post i spent like 10 minute`s and on my own language i can write same for 1m.

P.s.New players often ask about classes and like example i write smt :"If you like to play condi classes,then engi/necro/ranger better for that playstyle.Ele universal from this point.You dont have pure tanky/dd/healer class..All classes can be tanky/DD/healer and its depends from you build,but some of them still better then others or have some aptitude ".

How its looks like :"“Esli tebe nrav9tc9 classi kotorie ispolzuyt DoTi ,togda ly4she podoidet necr/eng/ranger.Ele yniversalniy v etom plane.4ustih heal klassov ili tankov tyt net.Vse mogut bit dd/tank/heal v zavisimosty ot builda/yklona,no opredelenniy sklonnosty vse ge imeytc9” (its also hard to read) This is simpe example and when you try to explain some traits/builds synergy →its blow up you brains.

I see where you are coming from but when i want to write something i write the cyrilic word in latin ex(bulgarian): Otivam da pravia neshto
just use phonetic cyrilic and write it in latin

I dont have any issues with it adding them to the games chat

But I have huge issues with them adding cyrillic to naming characaters.

People would be able to make names like “Dad” by using a Cyrillic letter a in place of the regular a and nobody would ever know the difference. This would hugely affect the current naming system and I absolutely do not want that.

In theory, ANet could add a bunch of different alphabets. The game is missing a small number of characters from kanji and cyrillic and of course it lacks anything in arabic or any number of other languages spoken by 100s of thousands or even millions of potential gamers.

Unfortunately, it’s not free for ANet to add them. They need to be rendered in a font appropriate for the game at several different sizes. QA is required. And they need to hire customer service experts who can make sure everyone on the relevant staff can identify when someone has tried to get around appropriating naming/chat rules by substituting letters.

None of that is necessarily difficult or really expensive; it’s just not free. So the community would have to give something else up.

If you look at the supported alphabets, they include all the languages for which ANet has a language-specific server or localization: English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese. The exception: Korean, the home language used by ANet’s holding company, NCSOFT.

tl;dr adding characters isn’t free; ANet is unlikely to add more without a compelling business reason to do so.

emikochan.8504:

Valee that is not comparable. The cyrillic community is not insignificant. Berzal is not asking for translation / voice work. It’s just for chat.

+1 to op.

Are you saying my fellow african buddies are insignificant? How dare you!

I dont need naming systems,only chat!Not localisation,not naming system,only chat.

I don’t see a problem with them adding Russian hieroglyphics.

Berzal.7294:

I dont need naming systems,only chat!Not localisation,not naming system,only chat.

Are you willing to pay extra for the staff that ArenaNet need to hire for it?

lordkrall.7241:

Berzal.7294:

I dont need naming systems,only chat!Not localisation,not naming system,only chat.

Are you willing to pay extra for the staff that ArenaNet need to hire for it?

You don’t need team of professional linguists and literature teachers to add support for cyrillic characters.

StrangerDanger.3496:

I don’t see a problem with them adding Russian hieroglyphics.

Lol? Cyrillic symbols exists in game and you can type it for example, in the TP search field.
It looks like artifical symbols restriction. Nothing more.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

You don’t need team of professional linguists and literature teachers to add support for cyrillic characters.

But you need people that can read it working at CS.

White Hunter.3416:

StrangerDanger.3496:

I don’t see a problem with them adding Russian hieroglyphics.

Lol? Cyrillic symbols exists in game and you can type it for example, in the TP search field.
It looks like artifical symbols restriction. Nothing more.

But you cant type in chat.

I can type my slavic in chat, i don’t see why cirillic would be an issue.

Arena-net keep silence like always.

I can’t type in Japanese and this has always bothered me. I have to type in roman characters when speaking to friends, which looks silly and is harder to understand.

White Hunter.3416:

StrangerDanger.3496:

I don’t see a problem with them adding Russian hieroglyphics.

Lol? Cyrillic symbols exists in game and you can type it for example, in the TP search field.
It looks like artifical symbols restriction. Nothing more.

They use a custom font for chat that doesn’t have anything in Cyrillic region in UTF-8

People who say they’d need “support” in Russian are also kinda wrong, as it doesn’t matter if people transliterate it or write in Cyrillic — if someone doesn’t know Russian they won’t be able to read it.

It would be great if i could write on cyrilic in chats.

If cyrillic symbols would be supported for chats it would be really great indeed. Actually it is the only thing that is wanted, not localisation or whatever.

Some ppl said that there could be a problem like “tons of russian letters in mapchat” – but isn’t there an “show only english” option in chat presets? so no problems with russian letters for ppl who doesnt want/need this.

Im not gonna offend anybody’s feelings or force anyone to read russian – no. We just as for a possibility to chat in our own language, nothing more. English is not so suitable for every case.

But once again: It is a matter of ArenaNet needing to hire people that can read the text, and that is not free.

what text do they need to read? the text that I will write in chat?
no need to translate or read anything, just add 10 text symbols for chatting, nothing more

igni.9345:

what text do they need to read? the text that I will write in chat?
no need to translate or read anything, just add 10 text symbols for chatting, nothing more

They need to be able to read it, in order to make sure that it does not contain abuse or other breaches of the ToS.

I think one of the reason they wont do this is because back in GW1 there was a market for guild tags with japanese characters, for example, the [ti?n] guild (think they used the “ta” symbol, dont remember) and people found that kind of stuff cool, but only people who had asian accounts could created those guild (if I rememebr correctly). As you can guess, a market regulated by nothing would have a lot of risks, espescially if it’s selling guilds. The amount of QQ that there was because people got scammed was prabably a reason as to why Anet didn’t bring back japanese/cyrillic/other alphabets.

That and because they want to restrict trading a lot.

I don’t get it. Is it really that hard to add cyrillic letters to use exclusively in guild/party/whisper chats? Wouldn’t that attract more loyal newcomers to the game? For three years we wait to no avail. Some other MMOs at least have unofficial cyrillic chat support via patches.

I can see this just being a pain to look at for western players (in map chat for example).

Besides, what makes you better than players from other countries with different alphabets? Why should cyrillic be added if for example, arabic hasnt been? Russian pride?

It can be made for guild/party/whisper only for example. So map chat won’t be flooded with it. Thou when I see german or french or spanish in map chat I don’t mind, even thou they look pretty foreign to me.

No, adding Cyrillic characters to the chat is not a big deal when it comes to coding. Even less work considering it already exists in the TP search fields.

I’m okay with this. I mean, I already know what blyat looks like in Cyrillic so that means I’ll know 75% of the words I see in map chat.

If its just the symbols they want added why not?

Khadez.4958:

I can see this just being a pain to look at for western players (in map chat for example).

Besides, what makes you better than players from other countries with different alphabets? Why should cyrillic be added if for example, arabic hasnt been? Russian pride?

First of all, I don’t get it what pride are you talking about. It’s all about players’ convenience and we here are pointing out a problem that is affecting a significant part of the GW2 community.
Secondly, what is suggested will affect only guild/party/whisper chats and won’t have any effect on map chat, btw it is already filled with German/French/Polish etc messages and I don’t mind at all. If you do, there’s “English only” filter just for your needs.
Finally, you may start your own thread and suggest adding whatever characters you are in need of and I will fully support that, because diversity and flexibility are simply too good to miss out.
Cyrillic alphabet is not used only in Russian, but also in Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, Mongolian and other languages. By the way, in 2007 Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the European Union.

Anet wont add them as committing resources and spending time on it, nomatter how small, could be seen as supporting the language in game.

This could unintentionally create an obligation for Anet to deal with reports containing the new characters, or provide support for those who talk in them. Which means they would have to hire someone who could read and understand said language and characters.

From a pure business perspective its too risky to enable characters which non of your employees can understand.

In addition to this you would likely get people from all over the world demanding their native language characters be added too, since a precedent has been set for enabling non supported language characters. Its just too much of a hassel for something that will only benefit a tiny part of the playerbase.

Not to say I dont sympathize with you, I can only imagine how disastrous it would be if the roles were reversed and I had to type exclusively in russian lol but Im trying to explain why for 3 years this hasnt been added, and will likely never be added.

I’m ok with that, as long as they cannot use the map chat. The main problem is that you can’t report them for any harassment or being rude, and trust me – being kitten is mostly treir favorite gaming option. You will let the devil out of the box.

Once again, I’m not asking for the translation of the game and Russian/ Mongolian/ whatever support. Most people who play the game already have decent skills in English/French/German/Spanish the game was translated into and won’t bother support in their native languages any more they are bothering now.
And by the way you can get an answer from support if you write in Russian already.
For those of you who are afraid of scary cyrillic letters haunting you around Tyria, there’s always a block button available, which should be sufficient imo.
And it’s not about only cyrillic letters, a full unicode support would’ve been nice.
I’m aware that there could arise some scamming possibilities involving cyrillic/ arabic/ chinese/ whatever guild names or whatnot, that’s why I’m suggesting the chat support only.

If they add cyrillic they better add the whole UTF-8. No playing favourites.

And its a shame they respond to russian support tickets. People should stop assuming they can use their native language accross the world and get served.

And no, im not a native english speaker. My alphabet also includes some non ASCII characters but i dont go demanding them to be added. I underatand that I wont be able to use my language everywhere i go and i adjust.

Don’t think the OP is asking for a full Russian adaptation, just something for chat.

I’m thinking it’s an issue with fonts and input method for whatever version of windows you are using. I do see Chinese and Korean in chat so it’s not a limitation of the game, and White Hunter showed you can type Cyrillic in some parts, but that is the “browser” window and not chat.

The ability to use Cyrillic in chat would be wonderful. The OP hasn’t really described the full extent of the confusion that tranliterated Russian can cause so I’ll go into a few details.

Russian has 33 letters, 9 are vowels, 2 are semi vowels, and a hard symbol and a soft symbol which can change the sound of a word. Compared to English which has 24 letters, 5 vowels, and potentially one semi-vowel (y). (Yes most of us were taught that y is a consonant but it frequently behaves more as a vowel.) The Russian alphabet is more complicated than the English equivalent so when it comes to transliteration you can expect it to be more messy. Consider the following:

1) The letter ya (backwards capital R) is first person singular in Russian so it means “I”. When typing in English letters some people will write ya and some will write I. (Why type two letters when you can type one?) However the letter which is the equivalent in sound to i, is the primary conjunction for Russian (the word “and” in English). Some write this as &, some as i, some as e, some as ee. It’s entirely possible that someone who chooses to use I for ya may choose to use i for “and”.

2) The letter “s” in English is “c” in Russian, Russian has no equivalent of the English “c” all “k” sounds are the Russian letter “k”. So some people transliterate the Russian “c” as “s” and some do not. To make life more fun some use “c” for the Russian letter “ch”, and some use “s” for the Russian letter “ts”.

3) The funny * looking letter in Russian is typically transliterated as zh. It’s the soft sound you get in azure and pleasure. Sometimes people choose to use the letter “j” since Russians don’t really have any equivalent, sometimes they choose just to use “z”, but Cyrillic has its own equivalent of z.

4) Cyrillic script has two letters that look somewhat like w. The sounds they make are “sh” and “shch”, some people write this in English with the letter “w”, some with “sh”.

5) b and B are two different letters, some people will use the English “v” where appropriate and some will use b for both, and some will use B as a capital surrounded by lowercase letters.

6) the soft sign (myagkii znak) and hard sign (tryodii znak) alter the sound of the word. They both look like a b. Some people use them when transliterating, some don’t. Some who don’t use them alter the spelling of the word and some don’t.

I wanted to keep this somewhat short so I’ll stop there, the simple fact is that transliteration of Russian into English letters is not something taught at schools. There is no formal way of doing it and I’ve seen many, many different forms over the years. When reading Russian written in English it may be necessary to read it multiple times to understand the rules by which the writer has change Cyrillic into English letters and it can be confusing.

This is a QoL matter. It doesn’t need to be available for names just for chat. For those who worry about people insulting them in Cyrillic, if someone reports them with a translation of what was said there is no reason why support can’t check that translation with Google (if necessary) or even employ someone who is bilingual. If they feel this is unrealistic then keep in mind that when someone calls you “hijo” in game, 9/10 they are not calling you a child, they are calling you something a lot ruder. I doubt that support has ever issued a warning for use of the word “hijo”.

TLDR: Transliteration of Russian Cyrillic into English letters is not easy and there is no formal way to do it. Cyrillic should be available for chat.

Ok, they add it in. Then two Russians speaking in Russian go at it and they report each other.

Google translate is not 100% accurate and they would need someone who could read the language for when someone appeals a ban.

Which means they’d have to hire someone. And I doubt that there are enough players who speak Russian to warrant that someone.

Seera, if someone were to call me c**kii c** and I told support what it meant they could confirm it with an Oxford dictionary, pretty sure Google translate could get through the majority of the rude terms. If I were to call you an “hijo” I wouldn’t be calling you a child.

Colloquially across Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and German there are many ordinary words which can be used in a very offensive manner and in many cases (like hijo) it is not immediately obvious by context that the writer is being offensive. In short in cases were translation isn’t clear it’s going to be no different than it already is and comes down to a he said-she said type argument. “I called them a child”, “No they called me ____”. With an ordinary term like hijo how does support judge it because in the context both hijo and the ruder meaning of it will make perfect sense.

What people are asking for is a QoL fix. It isn’t going to change people using rude terms in other languages only that when I read it I won’t have to read it three times to figure out what rules they have used to transliterate Cyrillic to English characters.

This is MMO. Communication is important !
Adding a Cyrrilic to chat is easy and is very important for RU speaking players.

I have no idea why Devs, that made such a nice game, do such a primitive mistake -.-

Cyrilic symbols have no place on servers that are not restricted to russia, Period.

Take any game where it’s not locked away – for instance, league of legends. you get ONE. just ONE person on your team who uses cyrilic, and they ill spam the kitten chat for all eternity with hieroglyphs that noone in the civilized world understands.

Im against cyrilic letters being added to the game-chat. unless its for a region-locked set of servers specifically for the Cyrilic-using community.

There’s literally no difference between someone spamming chat with cyrillic characters, or the same words transliterated, or just a random string of letters, numbers, and punctuation. Spam is spam, and if you can’t understand it, you can’t understand it. Doesn’t matter what the letters happen to look like, so the suggestion that it shouldn’t be added because some poor soul can’t handle looking at anything other than latin characters is absurd.

Adding support for additional characters isn’t necessarily as simple as it seems. There are a huge range of different character sets (ASCII, Extended ASCII, Unicode, ANSI, ISO Latin 1, to name just a few) and changing part of your program from one to another isn’t a trivial task, it tends to throw up a lot of unexpected and hard to find bugs.

On top of that, databases have a whole other set of standards and are if anything even more hassle when changing from one to another. Take for instance the chat logs Anet keeps; a change from one standard to another could potentially involve converting every single line of chat ever stored across the entire history of GW2 by Anet to the new format; not trivial!

So even though Cyrillic is in common usage, converting parts of the program to it might be such a monumental task that it might be just too much to do.

Cameron.6450:

There’s literally no difference between someone spamming chat with cyrillic characters, or the same words transliterated, or just a random string of letters, numbers, and punctuation. Spam is spam, and if you can’t understand it, you can’t understand it. Doesn’t matter what the letters happen to look like, so the suggestion that it shouldn’t be added because some poor soul can’t handle looking at anything other than latin characters is absurd.

The issue isn’t the “poor soul”, the issue is that ANet support still has to review the chat, an effort made more complicated by the addition of new characters and a new language.

Plus, that’s not the only issue. New character need to be rendered in the matching font at various sizes, various UIs need to be re-checked to make sure they can handle the new characters, as well as any number of other development costs.

And there’s very little benefit for ANet: how many more people will buy the game because it supports Cyrillic? of those who already paid, how much improved will they find the game, compared to other QoL changes that ANet might offer?

tl;dr there’s some (perhaps substantial) cost to adding new character sets and relatively little benefit.

Can we up this topic or probably even get a response from devs? As another Ru-speaking player i can confirm that there are plenty of russian players in the game still.

Dear ArenaNet,
I understand that most probably you afraid of spam in map chat or smth like this, but can we atleast be able to type cyrillic in guild chat?