Sick of arabs on eu servers!

Blizzard support doest even acknowledge that this is a problem.

They just respond with some copy pasted script with nice nice words.

They dont understand the problem and they claim this wont be changed by developers - Like- yeah - this is not a dev problem - clearly - this is an infrastructure \ server \ match making problem.

Like why the f can Blizzard not just make a Middle East Region - and the physical servers that are ALREADY there be grouped into ME. Why the f is this so hard for them to understand.

Yeah lets make a heavy team based game but but we going to group two continents that speak two different languages into one. YEAH BLIZZARD DID THAT.

Legit - just bought a VPN subscription from Winsdcribe for like 2$ a month to VPN me in to Germany so I dont have to deal with this toxic UAE/ME players anymore who harass you for not speaking arabic.

And this has been an issue for months … MONTHS.
The sheer incompetence cannot be understated.

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forget about it. VPN latency times are unplayable.

There was another thread about same issue a couple of days ago, where someone explained how to setup your firewall to block arabic server IP ranges, leaving you with EU als primary location.

maybe this helps: https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/g9azcx/how_to_remove_middle_east_servers_from_your/

It’s EU. There are at least 24 different languages, not even counting Russian. Believe it or not, there’s a good chance that at least one of your teammates does not understand English well enough to understand you. He might be a 12 year or French or German kid that’s only learning to speak English for 2 years.

One more language doesn’t make a difference.

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But Culture, Attitudes derived from that culture, and ping do

ā€œculture and attitudes derived from that cultureā€ Its a video game stop trying to justify your bigotry it doesnt make sense.

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Have Blizzard ever given an explanation why they throw EU players on ME servers? Cost saving? Lack of servers in EU?

Umm… its not bigotry my friend, it is just a fact, different cultures exist, and different attitudes exist, and not all cultures and attitudes can coexist peacefully…

its why we have violence and war… or did the past not happen?..

sorry that reality triggers you, maybe you should retreat to your safe space instead of discussing things on forums

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OP was complaining about the language barrier.

My guess is that there’s not enough people on ME alone to get quick matches. And before the ME servers those players were playing on EU anyway.

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yeah it’s probably this, the pool of ME players is too small to allow balanced games to be formed in a reasonable amount of time

it’s clear from this decision that the player experience is so unimportant they decided that merging the regions together was the way to solve that problem

either that or they think we’re too stupid to notice

ā€œyou think you want a reasonable ping, but you don’tā€

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Odd. Some of the best players in the game are from the ME region…

Not sure why the language barrier would be an issue, if you are playing on EU already… how many languages are spoken on their…

I play with a couple from Bulgaria fairly often… They don’t speak a word of English. I just keep my calls basic and they can usually understand what I mean.

Having the ME servers on EU is just like east, west and south servers on the NA ā€œserverā€.

If you are really upset about playing with people from the ME region, just group in at least a 3 stack. The game will then force you on to your closest server.

Not really. This is a bit like looking at the US, saying that there’s +100 languages spoken there, and then saying it wouldn’t make a difference to throw in Colombia (in a world where there was no ping issues obviously).

Why EU servers mostly function is because over 50% of all of the EU speaks English proficiently. The percentage of proficiency in younger generations has also increased like most of the rest of the world, and like always there will be positive correlation with internet use, wealth, interactions with English etc, that will all be correlated with OW users. I’d think an 80% guess for conversational English on the mostly younger EU players is conservative. The other critical factor here is there is no alternative for solo queue players. You can’t opt out to another language like German, French, or Spanish (or even smaller languages) without losing out on even more players. As a result English becomes the default lingua franca of lots of different players, and even people that don’t speak it conversationally will have learned basic call outs over the years.

There’s actually a large scale study that tracks these kinds of things called the EF English Proficiency Index. There is no EU country that tracks worse than moderate proficiency. Interestingly almost all countries in EU track at High or Very High proficiency except the largest non Germanic speaking countries. This makes a lot of sense and can help us understand the Middle East situation. If you are in the Netherlands you cannot expect to speak Dutch to many people outside of the Netherlands, and the places you can go in a comparatively smaller country are far fewer. It’s no surprise that English proficiency became a super important goal for countries whose first official language(s) were spoken by few people. Italy, France and Spain become exceptions of the norm as you aren’t nearly as limited by only speaking one of those languages. That said they were the only ā€˜moderate’ proficiency countries in the EU, everyone else being high or very high.

The middle east is a totally difference scenario. English proficiency is extremely low in the middle east, and is actually decreasing generationally (+30 year olds are more likely to be conversational in English than school or university age kids). The least proficient country in EU is moderate proficiency, and the most proficient country in ME is low proficiency. Most of the ME are ā€˜very low’ proficiency.

One of the major reasons for this is the ME uses a different lingua franca then English. Arabic is more widely spoken (+60%) in the middle east than even English in EU (+50%). Which means as long as you’re conducting your trade or doing your travelling within the ME, English is seen as a luxury. Additionally if your primary language isn’t Arabic, that will obviously be the best second language to be taught in school.

The conclusion is that comparing EU to ME is like comparing EU to SA except actually still worse. The two regions share a completely different common language. Make an EU only lobby and its likely 10/12 players will be able to understand each other at a conversational level. Make a ME lobby and it’s likely 8-9/12 speaking the same language (probably even higher, but I’m being conservative because I’m not sure how much access to tech trends with being taught Arabic). Make a lobby evenly split between both and you’re likely to have 5 speaking English, 4-5 speaking Arabic, and 2-3 who can’t speak either. The result is you have 1 person on your team you can coordinate with, rather than the typical 4.

I don’t have any skin in the game because I’m not playing in EU, but it always surprises me how little people think about the comparisons they make. There are legitimate reasons why sharing servers between regions where almost no one shares a language in the most team based shooter is gonna cause problems.

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Any sources for this claim? I’m not referring to the EU, but to the playerbase in EU server, most of which are (probably) young adults. In my experience, young people have a basic understanding of English, but not enough for a fluent conversation without thinking about it. If you’re busy trying to click heads or not getting killed by the enemy Tracer, it becomes pretty hard to speak English unless it’s either your mother tongue or you are used to it.

Yeah, I just don’t get this demand for everyone to speak English. Just screams of arrogance.

Maybe we should all be speaking Spanish. Maybe us English players need to pull our fingers out and learn new languages.

thats not arrogance, its an appeal for basic communication standards that the majority can agree on, so we can communicate with each other. Other languages have lost this fight, so please lets move on from this one…

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But what you are saying is English is better?

Nah, all this game needs is a decent ping system. Then you don’t NEED to talk to people.

im not making any qualitative claims on whether english is better or not, just pointing out status quo on this matter, which isn’t going to change anytime soon in foreseeable future.

I was joking.

But it isn’t up to the game devs. It should be on us to educate ourselves.

I’ve learnt a little Bulgarian to help when I play with a friend. We can all learn quick bits like Push, or Regroup.

Google how much it costs to buy and rent a server.

If you want to rent a server its very expensive. The servers here often get full aswell. Which indicates the quality of server that the company can or chooses to afford is very low in comparison to say ;;; twitter ;; or facebook. But then it only makes money via sales, whereas the social networks who have huge servers make money via ads

Before all you decide this is not an issue and being sympathetic towards this issue.

Why does every game on this planet have more than 3 regions to pick from and servers?
Considering the massive size of Blizzard - I think they can afford to open other servers and regions and let players choose where they want to play.

Is it racist to want to play with people who speak the same language as you?
NO its not - stop being some snowflake. This is the real world - not the candy land where everyone can just insta powder water mixed friends world.

Why is Blizzard forcing EU players alongside ME players ? Oh , because ME players dont have enough players to support it? How do you know? Only Blizzard knows - the fact that they have had 3 regions for decades shows you that they are NOT open to the idea to let they player base choose - they need to fabricate the FAST GAME JOINING EXPERIENCE.

Stop making excuses - Blizzard has been pandering to a very small group of their player bases need in sight of short term gains.

Here’s a real world tip for you - go look at the number 1 games in the word.

CSGO has servers EVERYWHERE and they let players CHOOSE where they wana play and include the option for you to host yourself.

CSGO cheating /swearing /grieving is not controlled by some trash automated reporting system that can be exploited by spam reporting falsely - dont pretend it doesnt happen - I have seen hundreds of posts and its happened to me for not choosing a hero my team wants without voice chatting or typing.

If you cannot admit that Blizzard treats their player base bad af - you are blind .