I get the point about it being offputting and feeling as if you’re not included, but not all conversations or ongoing topics require everyone to be included either, and switching your “own” language at that point just fits better.
I think the two NPCs gossiping is a great example.
I do exactly the same on the Dalaran market for example, common for everyone who walks up to our stall, but when I am suspicious or want to talk to someone about a customer/internal topic, I switch to Vulperan for example.
And yes, I am fully aware this excludes people from what I am talking about, but that’s intentionally the point.
I do like the language prefix thing, but this requires people to interact fairly and honestly. I use it myself as my character for example speaks Taur-ahe, but I also find it really off-putting when I use that language, and someone who I know doesn’t understand it just replies on the conversation.
It’s a lot more isolating and off-putting when one of the forsaken has to go AFK to cook tea. Meanwhile the other just has a chatbox of pure gibberish. When the blood elf scene was a majority of Horde in the days of yore () one of the biggest criticisms it got is because of this.
Oh yes, fully agree with that, consideration matters as does the context.
In that situation I’d still do what I did, but also swap to common to keep conversation going with the Forsaken player, because it indeed is just…poor RP if they are standing there alone.
I’ve rp’d a Nightborne who absolutely refused to learn Orcish and was actually abused IC and OOC because the Tauren magically knew how to speak Shalassian, and was mad OOC that my character was openly talking smack about them in a way he wouldn’t be able to respond to.
He’s a skinny crackhead, he isnt gonna say it to a cows face!
I might be a cynic but I don’t trust randoms to not abuse prefixes, it’s bad enough with the tongues pot. I’d love if you could learn a secondary language of your choice tho, add a little quest like cultural armour or something.
I think some people don’t realise that I mean to say that my character can understand Darnassian from an IC perspective but it’s due to the in-game language restrictions I can’t understand the language. Overall I think that sucks. It doesn’t add to my immersion to see garbled sentences pop up on my screen, especially because the languages in the game aren’t representative of the actual language at all - it’s just randomly generated words. That’s why I listed the Vulpera and Pandaren languages, which are extreme examples that just consist of ‘nom om nom’ or ‘yrrif yuff’ words.
It’s the equivalent of people not bothering to use Tongue pots in neutral RP settings despite your characters technically being able to understand each other.
The mogu did ban the “old tongue”, and the modern Pandaren language is a descendant of Mogu, but it’s not the same language, as it changed over ten thousand years. Even Lorewalker Cho needs time to translate ancient mogu writing.
They really missed a trick with Kul Tiran. They should of made it mumbled west country giberish like the old man from Hot Fuzz, or the guy from Clarksons Farm.
Finns and Swedes have been living side by side for well over 1000+ years, all of finnish clergy spoke swedish, swedish was the mandated official tongue up until 1902 when Finnish was given an equal status, and our nation is du!l-lingual, meaning all children are taught swedish for several years in school. We have also been friends and mingling with the swedes for all this time.
And yet, excluding the people with swedish as their primary tongue, more than 9/10 of native finnish speaking people don’t speak/understand swedish at a conversational level. Myself included.
The history bloop aside, while I don’t think dwarvish and gnomish are all that different and should be easier to understand, the point still stands that close proximity and mingling doesn’t equal sharing let alone understanding the same tongue.
As a fun side anecdote, from my own experiences its very common to in northern sweden near the border, hear many people speak primarily finnish. And on the opposite end of the border over in Finland, more swedish than there is on the actual swedish side.
Counterpoint, Finns and Swedes atleast have their own nations, gnomes and dwarves don’t.
I think the only true gnomish city (before Mechagon) was Gnomeregan, every other village, town and city has been shared between gnomes and dwarves (with the dwarves making up the majority).
A real life example would be (the former Kingdom of) Frisia and the Netherlands.
Frisian is dying out because they’re all using (mostly) dutch in everything, from schools to day-to-day affairs and contact with the government.
The Frisians and Dutch are closer to the gnome and dwarf situation than the Finns and Swedes I think!
So you only ever RP with other Nightborne?
That sounds kind of boring.
But also, if randoms start complaining OOC that your character is mean, the language knowledge pulled out of their butthole is not even the reddest of red flags, there.
) one of the biggest criticisms it got is because of this.
Overall I think that sucks. It doesn’t add to my immersion to see garbled sentences pop up on my screen, especially because the languages in the game aren’t representative of the actual language at all - it’s just randomly generated words. That’s why I listed the Vulpera and Pandaren languages, which are extreme examples that just consist of ‘nom om nom’ or ‘yrrif yuff’ words.