Guild Wars 2

To whom it may concern,

I have been playing this game since guild wars 1. I always wished I can type in arabic to communicate with some friends. We have to type arabic in english letters whichis hard.

The game will even feel different if we could see the letter :p

Hopefully guild wars 2 -anet- will add new languages soon.

Thanks for this awesome game : D
??????? ??? ???????

-Aizen Gent (CD, BG, SFR)

I think it’s unlikely. They haven’t even added all the European languages that have been requested and that would be easier for them to do since it wouldn’t need a new alphabet.

They haven’t heard for over 2 years now on the massive QQ from all of the russians, dutchs, portuguese and what not all others out there.
Why should they hear on now for your QQ about arabian language ??

Without having said it officially, but even without saying something officially, just by beign silent, you sent also out a kind of official message, that it seems to be not worthful enough for Anet to put all the time, money and ressources into adding more language…

Just look, how much text there would have to translated and thats not even the part, that creates the most costs.
no, the biggest cost factor is to create for their hundreds of NPC’s all of the hundreds of VOICE FILES which are extremely expensive, or do you believe, voice actors work for free, just because Anet asks them to help out ???.

The game has much bigger and more important thigns that need to get fixed and improved, than to overload the game with too much languages whose cost to revenue relationship must clearly not be worthful all the effort, otherwise Anet would surely already have used one of the two feature packs to include a new language pack within the last two years.

And personally I doubt it, that anet waits on “expansions” just to add new languages, because expansions are all about new game content, not features like more supported languages.

GW2 is an international game and this will always stay tghis and will stay away from language fonts, that large parts of the international community can’t read/understand like the hieroglyphic kyrillian, arabic, japanese/chinese letter fonts.
The biggest part of all international palyers of GW2’s “western” version are able to understand and use the roman letter system that we use here now and this will surely not get changed in GW2.

For the chinese version of GW2 it makes naturally sense, that there you have your chinese letters, because there the largest playerbase uses only that for communication and not roman letters, so this makes sense.

It surely shouldn’t sound rude, or should be meant from ANet as any kind of discrimination, like many people like to shout at ANet, because of their language being not supported – however from the viewpoint of wanting to make an international game, where all players should be able to understand each other, its the only common sense to do is supportign only a single text font, that the biggest percentage of your international playerbase can understand and this is and will always be only roman letters.

I think what we really want is bork bork bork.

I say why not? If it allows people in other regions to enjoy the game and play it as they want, then more power to them.

I didn’t mean the game language, I meant I just wanted to be able to type in arabic and be able to read in chat. Thats all.

AizenGent.9843:

I didn’t mean the game language, I meant I just wanted to be able to type in arabic and be able to read in chat. Thats all.

Sad story, but anet already quite ignored just same threads about support cyrillic fonts, so large communities like guilds can use their native language in-game (and not asking about localization or translation). Just using native language in chat – guild, party and whisper. Not obligatory to have a map chat as well, even so it will be nice. But I never seen a clear response from anet for those threads.

Even so I prefer to have attention from anet to this threads, because they quite soon was flooded with other people responding like “we don’t want native speakers use their own native language” and “use english or do not speak”.
Anyway I hope the story won’t repeat. Good luck, friend.

Do not want
15

AizenGent.9843:

I didn’t mean the game language, I meant I just wanted to be able to type in arabic and be able to read in chat. Thats all.

They are unlikely to support any languages that do not have official language version. Any such version requires a lot of investments, some of which are one-time (initial translations), others are constant (continued translations of any new text strings, language – fluent mods, and client support team).

Changing chat so it can accept some language characters may be seen as an endorsement for using that language in game – they may not necessarily be willing to do that.

Our version of the client doesn’t even handle Chinese very well despite the existence of the Chinese client …

Adding support for Arabic would entail support for right-to-left text. No idea whether that’s possible, given the often surprising limitations and obstacles of ArenaNet’s game engine. Should they be able to add right-to-left text, they should add Hebrew as well, by the way. There’s quite a few Israeli players in-game.

It is in the top 10 most spoken language, but maybe some of you guys don’t realize yet

AizenGent.9843:

It is in the top 10 most spoken language, but maybe some of you guys don’t realize yet

So is Portugese and they don’t support that either, which would be simpler to do since it wouldn’t require another alphabet. French however is supported, which Wikipedia puts 18th on the list.

My guess is they did market research on the most widely spoken languages in areas they officially released the game (North America and Europe) and included them. Or it’s an arbitrary choice.

Its regardless in which position of rank list that language stands. it doesn’t change the point, that Anet seems to doesn’t want for their international version of the game more than just only 1 language text font type, which percentually the absolute most people from all over the world are able to understand and this is and always will be the roman letter type.

No other letter type is used worldwide more for countless of different languages of various continents/countries, than this one. Deal with it.
Thats also the reason, why the chinese version of the game, which got their own version basically only because of their HUGE population together with the problem, that a real large part of that population doesn’t use the roman letter type got their own game version, which supports for them naturally the chinese letter font type among complete own servers and other little differences due to some political differences between china and the rest of the world.

People, please make your homeworks!
ANet surely wont make for every single little different language letter font type an own game client version with own servers, just so that everyone can communicate in the game in their own language letter type.

Its way too cost expensive to do something like that.
It took ANet 2 years to come out just with the chinese special game client.
Time that could have been used basically also better to improve the general game for everyone.

Do you honestly want from ANet to waste even more time, ressources and really alot of MONEY, just so that you can communicate with each other with some borderline letter fonts that are compared to the roman letter font just a small minority??
And this, when you clearly are also able to communicate with each other using the roman letter font type? And this since already 2 years???

Even such old and massive games like World of Warcraft also don’t support font types like cyrillic ect. as far as I know (correct me, if that got patched lately, I don#t play that game, but just from googling it latest source of info from 2013 says, no cyrillic for it.. just only ? if you try to type it …)

So why should do Anet all this effort with mostly no revenue, but only massive costs for them, if even such genre giants like WoW don’t do this to keep the game as international version as understandable as possible for as many people as possible???

Esplen.3940:

I think what we really want is bork bork bork.

At first I was like hu? Then I looked up what supported languages there was is Guild Wars 1 and there it was.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Running_the_game#Languages

Danikat.8537:

My guess is they did market research on the most widely spoken languages in areas they officially released the game (North America and Europe) and included them. Or it’s an arbitrary choice.

My guess they did do Market Research. The research was what was the most used languages in Guild Wars 1. Those languages were as follows:

English, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Bork! Bork! Bork!. Audio language is available in English, Korean, French, German, Italian and Spanish and can be freely mixed together (e.g. Korean text and German voices).

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Running_the_game#Languages

Orpheal.8263:

They haven’t heard for over 2 years now on the massive QQ from all of the russians, dutchs, portuguese and what not all others out there.
Why should they hear on now for your QQ about arabian language ??

As a Dutch player, I can tell you that the Dutch generally do not actively petition for Dutch language versions of PC games. I can give a number of possible reasons:

- The Dutch are not used to localized games, so expectations of the possibility are low. (We are well aware that our country is small, and our language area not much larger – i.e. encompassing The Netherlands, half of Belgium, Suriname, and rather-close-but-really-not South Africa.)

- Many Dutch people are proficient in at least some basic English. Gamers especially so. You can blame American popular culture for that. In fact, quite a number of gamers (myself among them) would find Dutch language versions of fantasy and science fiction content jarring and banal.

- The Netherlands and Belgium do not have a tradition of dubbing foreign movies and TV shows. Instead, we use subtitles. This increases exposure to (especially) the English language.
(This development is diminishing, as increasingly more foreign cartoons and children’s shows are being dubbed in Dutch.)

- In the case of Belgium (which consists of about 50% Dutch speakers and 50% French speakers), the native Dutch speakers are quite used to reverting to either English or French anyway when dealing with the French-speaking population. They can do the same in Guild Wars 2.

The Dutch know – as well as ArenaNet – that the Dutch-speaking gaming market is simply too small to justify a localized version of any PC game. And we are (generally) fine with that. Therefore, I find it highly unlikely that there would be droves of Dutch gamers demanding their own language versions. (Similarly, how many claims for Norwegian or Swedish localization have you ever seen?)

In the case of both the Russian and Arab languages, I can imagine that there are more legitimate claims for localized versions of Guild Wars 2. Many more people speak these languages than the Dutch language, after all. (Although the ratio of native speakers of these language who would consider buying games like Guild Wars 2 could be different.)
However, since these languages have their own script, it would require technical investments in the game UI and software, in addition to simply tranlating. This raises the threshold to implement such localization, as the number of people who buy the game as a result of Arab or Russian language support has to be quite high to justify the cost of not only translating all in-game text into Arab or Russian, but also enabling the Arab or Cyrilllic scripts in the game interface.

Astralporing.1957:

AizenGent.9843:

I didn’t mean the game language, I meant I just wanted to be able to type in arabic and be able to read in chat. Thats all.

They are unlikely to support any languages that do not have official language version. Any such version requires a lot of investments, some of which are one-time (initial translations).

He doesn’t want localization- all the game language can remain in english or whatever. He just wants character support- This shouldn’t be that hard; it should take a few hours to refactor the chat to use standard unicode instead of whatever it uses.

Piogre.2164:

Astralporing.1957:

AizenGent.9843:

I didn’t mean the game language, I meant I just wanted to be able to type in arabic and be able to read in chat. Thats all.

They are unlikely to support any languages that do not have official language version. Any such version requires a lot of investments, some of which are one-time (initial translations).

He doesn’t want localization- all the game language can remain in english or whatever. He just wants character support- This shouldn’t be that hard; it should take a few hours to refactor the chat to use standard unicode instead of whatever it uses.

That is what I meant, only the typing nothing else. I don’t know why people talking off topic.
In short, add more letters that we can TYPE in chat, but leave game fully English.

Yes, but as I said, keep in mind Arabic (like Hebrew) is right-to-left and requires a lot more than a simple addition to the “allowed characters” table.

i can write arabic language in black lion trading but on chat i can’t

It’s a cost benefit tradeoff:

COSTS

• It requires work to add an additional alphabet and vet the fonts for various display sizes.
• Outside of that, it requires additional support (training and translation), so that people don’t hide inappropriate speech in a different language.
• Adding any one alphabet puts pressure on ANet to add others, increasing the costs.

BENEFITS

• A fraction of the player base would have a preference met.
• A small number of people would be more likely to buy the game.

The start up costs might be modest; the maintenance costs are not. The benefits, however, are even more modest. Thus, ANet has stuck to the ones fully supported by the game: English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese…and Korean, which is the primary language spoken at NCSOFT HQ.

tl;dr it’s not worth it for ANet to add support for all widely-spoken languages.