Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone !
I open this thread to speak about the terrible communication of A-net with the non-English speaking players.
I created a similar thread few months ago, and I had some hope after the announcement of Jan 2014 but I’m sorry to say that nothing has changed since this post.

I’m french, so I’ll take all my examples on the french communty, but I’m sure Ge and Sp have the same problems.

Let’s begin :

Dev Livestream : Ready up
This is in my opinion one of the worst way to communicate. In these livestream, tons of new things are presented, and no sub-titles. Right now, the easiest way to transmit the information is to wait for a reddit summary (or watch the whole livestream), then translate it into our language, like one player just did here. But do you think it’s normal that players must do it by themselves ?

Our beloved CM ( and only, since the other CM posts twice per month or less) always send us the link of these Livestream. Like here. It’s very kind from her, but without subtitles…. useless.
Adding live subtitles is hard, I know, but at least on the replay, no ?

You may think I’m a lonesome and crazy forum warriors, but look at those comments from here

Oxytania.4026:

I like it, but when will we have a live translation ? Just to avoid the misunderstandings

melwindu.6245:

Live translation on a stream ? I guess it’s asking too much. I hope that someone will make a summary somewhere on the forum or on other fan-site.(….)

(Oh, and of course we never had the possibility to ask our questions to the stream team, naturally….)

Week-end Bonus
A direct consequence of the livestream.
I’m speaking about things like the rank bonus week-end or other future temporary events. You must include this kind of announcements IG !
At least you had here on the En forums some red posts to tell you “hey, it’s time to go pvp and use your glory booster”. On the other offcial forums, nothing.

After the first weekend, I really thought it was just a mistake, and even our CM apologized for it.
But guess what ? Second bonus week-end, same mistakes : nothing. No red post on our forum, nothing IG. Oh, and no apologies this time.

Collaborative Developpement
It was the main point of my last thread about this subject. I guess A-net just gave up CD with Fr, Ge and Sp communities. We simply don’t have any official thread about CD on our forum.
But some players try to do things, like posting their own amateur CD thread to create a small brainstorming (like this one about Ranger). Do you think CM supported this kind of action by posting “Hey, great ideas here, continue the good job” or " I’ve sent few ideas to my colleague, thanks ". Nope. Nothing.
So of course players don’t post anymore in these topics, with such a recognition of their work.

Dloyak Express
This a good idea, and perfectly executed on all forums. The process is the same on all forums and the time between answers and questions is fine.
But with all the problems listed above, it’s like the icing on the cake…. without cake.

Why are you posting here ? Go on your own forum, it’s the right place to do it
Well, we tried to create a constructive discussion with our CM. Here and there for example. But still no answers. Moreover we aren’t sure which information is (or not) sent to their colleagues. Posting here is a way to make everyone aware of the situation, including the devs and the decision makers of A-net.

Hey, your forum is far less active than the english one…. Why should we care ?
I often see this argument in the comments. But think about it : low activity =>no official posts and communication OR no official posts and communication => low activity ?
I think the second solution is the right one, since I know at least 3 other french forums that are really active. Players avoid the official forum, because it doesn’t offer anything more than the others (except a stronger moderation).

P.S : This topic is absolutly not an attack against the CM. I just want to point out that the communication strategy of A-net needs a rework.

TL;DR: Lots of information aren’t transmitted to the non-english speaking players, because of the means of communication used.

I can’t talk about Fr and Ge, but the spanish community is quite more active on external forums / community sites than on the official spanish one. We’re probably more active here on the english subforums (and it’s not like we’re known for our mastery on languages) than on ours.
Honestly, the feedback would have been next to non-existent.

Thanks for the comment, Vargamonth
You show that the problem isn’t only with the french community, and thus deserve an answer here. As a consequence, I hope this thread won’t be locked like the previous one, under the pretext that it only concerned one community.
The problem is, sadly, bigger than that.

The cost of translating everything is just too high. Especially for FR and ESP, because those communities dont have that much players, its not worth it for Anet. GER might be a little different because half of all GW2 copies in the EU have sold in Germany.

Wanze.8410:

GER might be a little different because half of all GW2 copies in the EU have sold in Germany.

Source ?

Anyways, there are 7 ge servers, 5 fr servers and 1 sp server, and all these players buy gems like any other players. So I don’t think money is really a problem.

And, honestly, at least making a summary of a livestream (on the forum) shouldn’t be that expensive..

Markus.9084:

Wanze.8410:

GER might be a little different because half of all GW2 copies in the EU have sold in Germany.

Source ?

Anyways, there are 7 ge servers, 5 fr servers and 1 sp server, and all these players buy gems like any other players. So I don’t think money is really a problem.

And, honestly, at least making a summary of a livestream (on the forum) shouldn’t be that expensive..

398,638 out of 835,413 have sold in Germany, i have no numbers for Austria but i would bet that more than 18k copies sold there.
83,243 copies sold in France.

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/37350/guild-wars-2/Europe/

Not even 0.5% of all copies worldwide sold in France, probably less in Spain.
If i was Anet, i wouldnt spend alot of ressources on localisation in those markets, while working at a chinese localisation which brings in millions of new players.

While I agree that all information should be relayed reliably and in a timely fashion it’s naive to expect Devs to take international feedback about general game issues.

Any issues French, German or Spanish players may have is surely experienced by English players as well. Time-zones aside I don’t see why EU players would have different problems or relay different feedback than NA/UK players.

But don’t feel bad. The recent balance-notes to the feature patch made it pretty obvious ANet doesn’t listen to anyone but themselves.

I have documented the lack of coherent communication, and the many instances of bad or miscommunication by Anet employees. There is a lack of leadership that would quell many forum and community flare ups, that fact is not lost on many players.
IMHO, they need to hire a communications manager to bring everything together under an umbrella of well thought out and standardized level of communication with the players at large, and those that use the forums.
The problem will continue and become a bigger strain on the brand of Guild Wars as time passes unless the problem is addressed.
The lack of inclusion of different language communities is just a manifestation of a misguided communication policy.

Unfortunately language issues are going to happen.

This is a game created in the US. It’s official language is English. With game translations into other languages. It’s been like that for many other games. (Not all, but many.)

If you play a Korean MMO, you will have the same issue. Everything is in Korean and there is no translation available.

As much as it would be nice if the stuff was translated, it pretty much requires your player base to do such communication. The cost of translating absolutely everything would simply be too much.

That’s simply the cost of playing a foreign produced game.

I don’t ask for a perfect equity between all languages. Of course GW2 is a game created in US, so some things are impossible to do in french, german or spanish. FOr example, translating every red post is impossible, and a “true” CD with a dev is an utopy (devs can’t master all languages, and are already overworked by the english CD).

And what bother me is that every preview/announcement/bonus week-end seems to be advertised ONLY for the english community….

For example, most of my friends discovered the changes of zerk last week, although they were known for months …

And Gw2 isn’t like a typical Korean game. They’ve done so much work to adapt their game to differents languages -they’ve even translated the names of the NPC, and the puns !- that this miscommunication is for me a mess for the localization team work.

As a person who understands that English is a de facto international language, I simply learned English and wouldn’t have visited the Russian community even should it had been officially established.

And people like me might be the reason why other communities are getting “abandoned” by the developers – they simply see no sense in duplicating content since everybody speaks English (or at least is capable of reading or listening to it). And if people don’t because they’re junior school gamers who haven’t even started their English course, then most likely they can’t give any valuable feedback anyway.

That said, I do agree that if these communities have been officially established in the first place, then treating them that differently is not a good thing.

To be honest, if you are really interested in games and game industry you should learn English. I play games since over 25 years and it was very normal that games had no localization. At the age of 14 I played a JRPG called Lunar it was all in English, but I had the will to learn it, so I took a dictionnary and learned the words I didn’t understand.

I never understood the denial of learning no language. It is even worse in Germany where you can’t even watch movies in original language (almost every cinema/movie theater shows movies with German dub).

I think the major issues is the cost Anet is a small dev company the cost of hiring translators is expensive. I rather see them put those resources into development then translation of what’s going on. The best thing to do is set up fan sites in you own language and translate it there, I’m sure if Anet hade the resources they would translate everything to as many languages as passable.

So why not close all the three other official forums, fire the french/german/spanish teams working for A-net and tell the thousands of players in Eu : “Learn English, noobs !” ?

It was decided that 4 languages would be supported years ago, they must face the consequences now

Markus.9084:

Week-end Bonus
A direct consequence of the livestream.
I’m speaking about things like the rank bonus week-end or other future temporary events. You must include this kind of announcements IG !
At least you had here on the En forums some red posts to tell you “hey, it’s time to go pvp and use your glory booster”. On the other offcial forums, nothing.

Oh man, that rubbed me the wrong way, too. These sort of announcements absolutely need to be in-game somehow — and not just on the log-in screen in a feed of blog posts that flicks by quickly with the auto-launch option checked. I mean properly in-game. Half the time I ignore the stickied threads at the top of each forum because they tend not to change from week to week. Maybe a new color for urgent/limited time posts/announcements is a temporary solution..? Along with a notification by the sub-forum that such a post exists, because how would I know it’s there unless I checked every single sub-forum. Hm. I had no idea glory boosters were being removed from the game until basically the day before it happened, and by then I’d already scheduled my evening full, so I couldn’t take full advantage. And I was never aware of that weekend event until your link.

I hope they work on a solution for communicating with the non-English communities, OP :)

Thanks for the perspective. I thought we had it bad in the dungeon every-non-living-story subforum.

At least we’re ignored in english O.o

I can’t understand why some people, and some cultures in particular refuse to learn proper english and would rather play/read/watch everything in their native language than actually put in the effort to learn one of the most used languages in the world.

It truly baffles me.

Well I can understand people complaining about those streams since understand spoken English for someone whose mother tongue is not English is very hard, especially given that some of Anet members love to speak very fast, on pretty low volume or talking while laughing at the same time, which makes it very hard to understand.
However, not being able to read/write with the help of dictionnaries is not really an excuse … those streams always have a written version at the end, which helps.
And if people aren’t happy with it, they just wait for patchnote in their own language …. that’s it.

English is my third language, but I don’t see the problem here. I’d understand if we were talking about poor countries with little or no decent free education, but if you live in central Europe and don’t speak English, it’s your own fault. If you want to get involved in international business, don’t expect everyone else to learn your language.

dekou.6012:

English is my third language, but I don’t see the problem here. I’d understand if we were talking about poor countries with little or no decent free education, but if you live in central Europe and don’t speak English, it’s your own fault. If you want to get involved in international business, don’t expect everyone else to learn your language.

Pretty much what this guy said

ProtoGunner.4953:

I never understood the denial of learning no language. It is even worse in Germany where you can’t even watch movies in original language (almost every cinema/movie theater shows movies with German dub).

I’m glad someone else knows this. Every time this conversation has come up, people try to tell me that Germans somehow magically all speak English and that just isn’t true.

Communications from Anet could be a whole lot better, but that applies to the English language too!

Learning or not another language isn’t the point of my thread.

This game has been sold as being fully translated in french/german/spanish.
There were no small line on the contract that said : “in order to fully enjoy the game, english is required”.

And again, if everyone must learn english to play games (according to you), why did they spend so much money in localization ? Why are there 3 other forums ?
If they’re useless, better remove them, no ?

The game is fully translated. Livestreams and forums aren’t a part of the game. The only issue I can get behind is the bonus weekend, which should’ve been announced in the launcher and translated.

Previews are for me part of a game…

Meanwhile, another livestream, still no subtitles. Again our CM posted something about it, but what’s the point if 80% of the players can’t understand it ?

And I would like to show you another example of this miscommunication: the lags in WvW.
Allie was looking for info about this issue here. I’m sure the problem is the same everywhere, in Na, in Eu, therefore this post didn’t need to be translated. I agree with Dee Jay.2460 on this point.

But guess what ? Now non-english speaking players are complaining about lags
They have no idea that devs are looking for a solution, they don’t know that Allie collected data about it.
I mean, posting something like “It is a known issue that is currently being investigated by our devs” was too hard ?