As a long-time fan of World of Warcraft, I am writing to you on behalf of the Ukrainian player community to request that you consider introducing Ukrainian localization into the game.
At present, we, Ukrainian-speaking players, face certain difficulties and limitations due to the lack of the ability to enjoy the game in our native language. This creates inconveniences for many players who want to fully participate in the community and enjoy all aspects of the game.
Additionally, we encounter discrimination from some Russian-speaking players. The absence of Ukrainian localization and the predominance of the Russian language in the game lead to discrimination and linguistic pressure on Ukrainian-speaking players. This creates an uncomfortable and sometimes hostile gaming environment.
The Ukrainian World of Warcraft community is significant and growing actively. Introducing Ukrainian localization would not only attract new players but also demonstrate your respect for the cultural and linguistic diversity of your global audience. It would also help create a more inclusive and comfortable gaming environment for all players.
We sincerely ask you to consider our request and take a step towards Ukrainian-speaking players by implementing the Ukrainian language in World of Warcraft. Your support and attention to this issue would be greatly appreciated by the entire Ukrainian community.
To put it bluntly, your community isnāt large enough to warrant the investment in a localization of the client for this.
Same reason why thereās no Polish client, no Czech client, no Dutch client.
Player base speaking and using those languages isnāt large enough to warrant the investment.
Not going to happen. Last time they did new local severs was the Italian ones and that was a failure (I did play on Pozzo at the beginning and it was pretty much dead from the start).
I came across the following:
I communicate in my native language (Ukrainian).
As soon as a Russian player sees a message in the chat, he makes a complaint simply because the text is written in a language he hates (in this case, it is a message about searching for a guild).
The system automatically bans me and I canāt play!
Appealing the restriction does not bring results!
How then to play? Give me some adviceā¦
WOW is a social game, and then I should remain silent and not write at allā¦
Isnāt it possible to at least pay your way out of it from a transfer? Or just play on the EU realms. Youāll have to give up the Russian client though but it seems like you wonāt mind.
I never did press accept but my transfer tokens were able to find ŠŠ¾ŃŠ“ŃŠ½Š½Šø and I got a little checkmark, then didnāt click OK. Butā¦ it might work to migrate RU->EU?
I know that means youāll lose the community you have on the Russian realms butā¦ hard to be a member of one if youāre constantly squelched anyway, soā¦
Yeah butā¦ I think itās the only way.
Other than rerolling of course.
You can try asking Blizzard CS if they wanna help you since youāre getting falsely banned and need to get out of the server to play normally? I.e. make a harassment case out of it. Idk, I donāt think itāll work, but it might.
EDIT: Also, I donāt see any way of you getting a localisation. Donāt take that as them not caring; itās just that your population generally already speaks 2 languages they do support, and Ukraine doesnāt have that many people, and fewer still that have the money to play video games - and of course the war didnāt help in that department eitherā¦
Canāt disagree with opinion, that our community is too small to make separate localisation. But if u want to transfer your characters from ru realms, u can try to write a ticket to support (ofc u should do this on eng language), and mostly they just can give you free transfers for characters which are 70 l lvl (I did it on November 2023, it worked).
And what else? How is there a problem with enjoying the game? It is in international English. Since you wrote the topic this way, I donāt see a problem with not playing in English. You donāt need the game in your language right now. Not all languages in the world are available in the game, but somehow people manage it without any problems. I can already see that we are reaching the point where you are starting to demand the Ukrainian language everywhere.
If you have a problem with discrimination, report people who break the rules. And if itās too much effort, change the server.
If you donāt want to pay for transfers, thereās never been a better time to level new characters on international realms. In remix, you could probably get your whole current characters roster āre-leveledā within a week or two.
You seem to be proficient enough in English to be able to play within the international community, and if you donāt wish to use English primarily, Iām sure your could find some Ukrainian guilds and communities on the international realms. There are many such ālocalizedā communities all over the place. There are Finnish guilds, Swedish guilds, Czech/Slovak guilds, Polish, Turkishā¦ none of these have their own localization in the game but they make do anyway.
Moving to the international realms is probably your best option here, because thereās absolutely no way youāre getting a Ukrainian localization. Theyād have to translate the entire game and hire countless voice actors to re-do all of the voice acting, which probably cost more money than theyāre getting from the entire Ukrainian playerbase, not to mention how much time it would take, and theyād then have to maintain this moving forward. In fact I donāt think theyāll ever make a new localization again. It already costs enough money to have all of the current ones.
Also to add, if you have a community you donāt wish to lose, encourage them to also make the move. They presumably run into the same issues you do, so they have the same motivations.
This is actually a very good point, especially seeing as it can gear you quite well too, and by the time youāre done itāll let you straight out into the Warband system.
So you could make a character that looks identical with the same name (or as close as you can get with Latin letters) and class and everything, convince yourself itās actually the same character really, and carry over the entire collection for free.
Or you can transfer it. Or convince Blizzard to. Apparently it has worked for some! Iām not surprised, Blizzard does have a particularly soft spot for Ukranians when they are inā¦ unwanted interactions with Russians these days. As do most.
The gearing is the nice part, you donāt even need to do it. Since the Remix characters are going to be going straight into TWW, and obviously will not be keeping their Remix gear, theyāll have to be given sufficient gear to begin leveling in the new expansion, so all thatās really needed is to just level to 70 and forget about it for the remainder of the event.
As opposed to leveling in Retail, which youād have to spend time gearing, because I donāt think starting off an expansion with the starting gear of the last expansions would be exactly the greatest experience.
That is of course presuming that Remix character will get standardized starting gear after transferring to live, but Iād be surprise if thatās not the case.
Be great if Blizz started suspending players for abusing the report functionā¦ instead of their victims having to deal with the inconveniences of said abuseā¦
This is one of the places where I think AI could be genuinely useful. An AI could go through chat logs form the time of the report, guess the context, and only forward cases worth reviewing to an actual human to look at and make a verdict.
Most of the process would still be automated, and pointless reports filtered out, so the human labour cost would be reduced significantly, with a much better outcome than automatically banning someone because a guild decided to mass report them for something mundane.
I know it canāt determine context, thatās why I used to word āguessā, which it absolutely can do.
Iām not advocating for a fully automated AI moderation just an AI-supported system that filters out unsubstantiated or āone-offā reports and forwards the worst suspects for a human review.