Don't merge realms of different languages!

Community General Discussion
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@Ishayoe: Neither of the above. I am trying to say that there is far larger number of “English” realms that actually do not have English as their primary language. Effectively, the ONLY difference to numerous other realms is that Aggra has customer support in Portuguese. Also, if people make Frostmane “collapse” it just increases the pressure to add even more realms to the total connection.

Interesting, because I fail to see how unless you have some personal insight into Polish players using far more English than the Portuguese?

@All: What I am trying to say here is that there are MANY realms, where English is NOT the most common language despite the support being available in English. If people do not wish to get connected with language X, we will rapidly reach a point where nothing can be connected to anything and only Silvermoon and Draenor remain of the normal realms, because everyone either transfers to those or quits the game. :frowning:

EDIT: Added a missing word.

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  1. Normally an English realm will converge on English because it’s officially marked English. Everyone on it will be able to to easily authoritatively argue that it’s an English server and therefore that’s how it’s going to be. You can’t do that when the server is actually officially Portuguese
  2. There are far more servers than there are languages of noteworthy size in Europe. There are dozens of dead realms with no language-specific community on it, so I don’t buy that argument at all.
  3. We don’t care if more realms are added to the connection. If Blizzard are truly going to go in this direction, then f***it. Respect lost, we’re moving on. Not my problem, even if it pisses me off all the same.

They do, generally - but that’s not the point anyway. It’s that Aggra (Portugues) realm hanging around in there.

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@Ishayoe: Unfortunately, not correct. :frowning: I still have occasional nightmares from program 1’s greatest failure in this specific regard. Takralus (and possibly other blues as well) actually had to permanently ban some people for extreme rules violations (both on forums and ingame).

There are (after tomorrow morning, if the connections succeed) by my count 37 English normal realms left (36 if you wish to see the 3-way connection as full Portuguese and therefore not count). Out those four (Silvermoon, Draenor, Kazzak and Twisting Nether) are extremely unlikely to get connected to anything. If we then exclude the four I mentioned earlier, we are left with 29. Because any of them is a potential connection target, we might go down to as low as 14 (13 “pairs” and one “3-way”) or if there are more “3-ways”, even less.

Let me see then, sufficiently significant numbers of native speakers to form a real or perceived majority on a realm… Finnish (2), Norwegian, Danish, Dutch (2+), Turkish, Greek… That is 8+ out… leaving six or less… Then quite a few languages, where I am not sure on numbers… Hungarian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Ukranian, Romanian, Arabic, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Serbian, etc… Let’s assume all of them fit on two. That leaves a maximum of four connected realm groups where English might be the majority native language.

I excluded Swedish, Polish, Czech and Slovak due to the four earlier mentions. I also left out Russian, Italian, German, French and Spanish, because they have the option of using their own realms.

As for the third point… Considering the fact that the connection program is barely started, I guess I am left with few other options than to wish you and others moving out happy days on Silvermoon (for alliance) or Draenor (for horde). Actually paying for any other move option is too “risky” for the time being (my subjective opinion only, of course, but worth considering during your meeting tomorrow…).

Oh well, I guess we just have to agree to disagree on this point. I am not that interested in whether some majority is official or unofficial, if it exists in reality. And luckily, as Shopkeeper, I have been blessed with the possibility of learning multiple foreign languages in addition to my native Finnish and Swedish (Finland is officially bi-lingual (though a few variants of Lappish are also taught) and a minimum of one foreign language is compulsory, so even though skills vary wildly, effectively all young Finns above the age of 16 are at least partially tri-lingual (or more)).

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This is an interesting point, wowrealmpopulation website is not very reliable for some stuff, but a thing it does well is telling you the ratio of the pre-connected realms, so we can still see grim batol was slightly bigger than aggra and ally dominated, while aggra horde dominated.

IF we assume no changes in the commonly spoken language, as in let’s say 60% there speak english and 40% portuguese, if they get connected with an english speaking server, this % can only increase for english and decrease for portuguese.

In fact, frostmane is full ally, the difference of ally population is very significant between grim batol and aggra, add frostmane and you SHOULD get a mostly english faction.

@Ishayoe: so basically I think for alliance side there should already be more english than portuguese people, when frostmane joins should become even more, after all there’s only ONE original portuguese server, and that means eventually the language will converge to english, I don’t think you even need 1 more connection, frostmane should be enough to set a clear majority.

Trewl, as for your last post, I think there’s 40 if connections go through, not 37, normal english realms left, cause on my spreadsheet I have 44 and as far as I know atm there’s 4 RP: argent, defias, moonglade, DMF.

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@Esploratore: Thank you! As I am working with just a list, not a spreadsheet, it is possible (and probable) that I have somehow overlooked something and it is missing, because I just recounted (I was very tired last night) and now ended up with 39 (not 37), still one short of your number. Maybe you will able to help me narrow the problem down?

My list for normals has…

11 singles
14 2-ways
7 3-ways
2 4-ways
3 5-ways (including the not yet fixed Hellfire + 4 group)
1 6-way
1 10-way

Total 39.

Ahhh… Your spreadsheet probably has the Hellfire group still separate so that is where your “one more” comes. :smiley: Still thank you for pointing out that my count from yesterday was off!

And there are indeed four RP realms (for now), though we both expect that number to go down later on during the program. :slight_smile:

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I remember situation on Burning Legion (95% players are Polen) they start to killing and spit on players that use other language to get rid of them. Now trade chat is all time Polish only.

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Support language is not related to the realm language. Currently, Blizzard offers support in all the languages the game is translated, but the language used by Blizzard’s GM when some player opens a ticket is not determined with the language used on the realm where the ticket is opened, after all everyone is able to open tickets outsite of the game in the support page with no direct relations to any realm (for example asking support about something related to your account or just something that it is account bound)

The language used by customer support is determined by the language the player’s choice in the account details page, there is an option “communication preferences” where the player choose wich language support he wants to receive. So, a player who has a character for example in a german realm and choose french in communication preferences will have support in french, not german.

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@Jadzia: Seems that has changed somewhere over time, because I can vaguely recall specifically logging in a character on an English realm to ensure I could talk to someone who knows English, because my problem was beyond my ability to explain in German…

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Well, that question was done some time ago and the reply was:

  • Support language was never linked to realm language
  • The language of the client sets the support language for ingame tickets
  • Webpage language sets the support language for out of the game tickets.
  • If you write a ticket for example in French, and the system sends it to a employee that doesn’t know French, he or she will reassign it to someone that does.
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@Neosaro: Hmmm… Interesting… Since I have had my client in German at times, there is an off chance (since it has been so long since I last needed to make an ingame ticket) that I actually had German client, but since I swapped to English realm character AND used English in my ticket that the ticket was actually rerouted… which is something I could not see from outside… :smiley:

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Or maybe all people working at support knows English (or enough English to understand your problem and reply to it) so they didn’t need to reroute it to someone else.

I mean, support is (or was) done at Ireland, and if my memory is ok, at job openings they said the language at work was English.

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No problem, and indeed, I have 3 different spreadsheets, 1 of them with the connections before 2nd round (123 realms, 107 non-russians), 1 of them with the current situation, at this precise moment (121 realms, 105 non-russians), 1 of them with the connections announced should they work (116 realms, 100 non-russians), the constant problems with connections made me refrain from just updating cause then I knew they’d fail, and would have to revert the changes I made!

I haven’t got the chance to check yet, but apparently you found the problem already, good, I indeed reverted hellfire-kilrogg to NOT connected after it failed.

And yes, RP english realm numbers will be 2-3 eventually and normal realms numbers will go down even more significantly.

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@Neosaro: :smiley: It was rather complicated, but you might still be correct. However, seems I can not check on it as according to the web site I have no archieved tickets whatsoever. Which means even the latest case is so old it has been removed by Blizzard or did not carry over when they gave up on the old forums and stuff… Can not tell, because at least at a quick glance I did not see any mention of archives expiring by themselves as such. However, ancient tickets are basically unnecessary fluff…

@Esploratore: Wow, that is a lot of stuff. I assume the first version is purely for archives now so you can look into the past, if needed? :slight_smile:

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@All: Seems more than one of us actually misread the timetable… The connections are for this EVENING, not morning. :smiley: BIG OOPSIE! :smiley:

EDIT: I wish EU postings used the 24 hour clock… :smiley:

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Interesting. A blue banned them.

Do you think that’s going to happen from someone spamming Portuguese text on a Portuguese server?

I hope not!

The Nordic languages, with the notable exception for Swedish for whatever reason, don’t make language-communities large enough to take up a server, and all of them speak English very often. It’s nothing like Portugal.

There aren’t enough Greeks playing WoW to take over a server, and that also applies to all the baltic and east-european languages. Many of these communities play on the Russian realms as well.

Generally the Arabs make their own communities and you will find Polish and Dutch ones, too. The other nationalities simply aren’t big enough to take over a server.

Even the Polish - there’s a reason WoW isn’t translated into Polish even though all their other games are.

But honestly, I’m okay with any of that because at least it isn’t official.At least you can’t argue Blizz just doesn’t care about their own server designations. And I realise now that you think it doesn’t matter, but I think it does.

I do worry that’s phase 2 of this, although I kindda doubt it.

I think it was half Ireland and half France. Probably still is.

The company I work for also gets tickets and bug reports from all over the world. A few weeks ago I had to solve a defect that was written in Haitian French. Spent ages just figuring what in the heck they were talking about, and then I actually had to work out how to fix it.

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煮豆燃豆萁，豆在釜中泣。本自同根生，相煎何太急

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Ahah, curious, I at least didn’t misread! As far as I recall, the US are gonna have connections at 7 a.m. PDT, which I read up on, means pacific daylight time, it’s basically the west coast time, example california, and they stated it corresponds to 10 a.m. EDT, as in eastern daylight time, the east coast time, example new york, so for us, at least for me in italy the american connections will happen at 16, while the european connections will be at 21, hopefully we’ll get a decent % of successful connections in eu too this time.

Also, I’ve been wondering: are you around also in game nowadays or only on forums? Cause I remember checking this char of yours a short while ago and seeing it hadn’t been logged for 2 months.

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@Ishayoe: Not for speaking Portuguese, but there is a risk of behaviour similar (or far worse :frowning: ) to one Plamcia described (and in the case that still haunts me, BOTH sides acted horrible). Because she was not allowed to tell me (remember I am an outsider), Takralus did not expand on the topic, but I heard rumours from player sources that there were even real life death threats. :(:(:frowning:

Good English skills generally yes, but your reasoning has at least one major hole. I am not sure how big the Norwegian and Danish player bases are, but the Finnish one is massive in relation to population. In fact, unless my memory fails me, when WotLK and Cataclysm launched, in Europe they sold most per capita in Germany and Finland. Just to give you a generic idea… A single gaming store (and there were several at a time) sold over 400 standard and at least two dozen CE copies during the Cataclysm launch night. Given that my home town at the time had around 200 000 people total, that means more than 1 / 500 bought it… Applying a similar ratio to the whole country means that a population of about 5 million bought well in excess of 10 000 copies in a single day.

Since digital purchases made midnight openings (both Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor saw massively declining physical numbers in the stores I used) obsolete and none were arranged (here) for Legion or Batte for Azeroth, it is more difficult to say how popular WoW remains here. However, I know there are multiple Finnish guilds of very significant size accross the realms and even more of those that have Finnish minorities among their numbers. Certainly enough to “take over” two realms, if they decided to mass on specific ones. The Dutch have around three times as much total people so even if they had far lower per capita sales, the absolute numbers would be higher (therefore my note of 2+).

I do have to admit that the Dutch typically speak excellent English, in my opinion several of them actually better than the natives, so Dutch takeovers would not cause language problems as such. :smiley:

@Esploratore: I did not pay enough attention to the starting time, so I was thinking they would preliminarily end around 05:00 CEST today, not tomorrow. :smiley:

I have been playing more Classic and also on some very low level alts. It has indeed been a while since I last logged Trelw all the way into game (I have been in the character selection screen, but there is no way for people to see that). :smiley:

EDIT: Minor typos.

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Sound like a complete fiasco.

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I mean WoW wouldn’t be translated into Portuguese either if it weren’t for the Brazilian market, Aggra as a server came to be as a by-product of a Portuguese WoW client existing even though it wasn’t developed for EU servers, and if it were just the EU population to sustain it, I don’t think wow would have ever been translated into Portuguese.

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