The game cannot even know what language skills a player has and the game can be switched to any. Well, I can select an Italian realm and all is fine, or Spanish, or German, or French.
But I was curious and selected a Russian realm and it immediately rejected the attempt, saying:
"You are trying to play on a realm with a different language."
Not out of personal mindset but if I take Blizzard by their own ideology, I could teasingly call this racist.
Chinese realms are not listed because they are a different region with very different legal conditions, basically a separate business with a separate game client, quite like countries in America, but Russian realms are listed, so what gives?
This is not the first cringy-clumsily problematic-sounding error message I have experienced with the game. I still remember the equally potentially offensive information that I cannot use “black” in my character name because that is mature language. Like, what, are you saying “black” is a swearword, a vulgarity?
This also works like that in the other way around. If you play the game in the Russian language you can not play in any non-Russian realms.
I do not know why this happens now but originally, when Russian realms were first launched there was a separate subscription for Russian players that only allowed them to play on Russian realms
I don’t want to mess with my client right now (my Russian is only RUdimentary), but when you switch the language of the client, does it require a download? Or only if you switch audio language, too? And that (text or also audio?) is all you need to do to play on those and then the other ones are blocked?
I have never switched to Russian but I had sometimes switched from English to Spanish and indeed that requires an additional download. Also, I am able to switch audio and text language separately. I currently play with Spanish texts and English audio. I am not sure if the Russian realms limitations require Russian text or also Russian audio, probably the first one. Anyway, if you try, do it first with Russian text, the download size of the text should be smaller than the downloaded required for the audio.
