EU Forums are apparently melting down

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
394

What the hey?

Things just got serious.

395

This is not just about language skills, although it is is an important part of the whole issue. Over 16 million Germans lived in the DDR under a soviet regime and learned Russian instead of English, many other Germans never really used English in their daily life and forgot most of it.
Plus, as many Americans should already know from their own country, not every school out there is a great place to learn things and there are differences in the level of education you get.

A thing that only a few people seem to talk about is culture.
German WoW players have a different culture than the players on the English speaking EU realms. When I compare the community I met on the Elysium private server to the community on Nefarian (German 1.12 private server), there are HUGE differences between the two.
Almost every single time a German player who played not in the original Vanilla and only on international private servers gets into a discussion with our German Vanilla veterans it evolves into a fight.

Loot rules? Completely different, half of the standard loot behaviour you see on servers like Elysium is considered ninjalooting in the German community and would lead to many, many entries on ignore lists. Rolling need on stuff you wanna sell on the AH, ridiculous!

You often see completely different ideologies when it comes to raid setups, hardcore vs casual play and many other different things.

I just wanted to make a point that your translator will have problems with “lazy writing”, small mistakes and regional dialects and it actually did work surprisingly well with my test sentence. I’m impressed, Google!
The problem I see is that from my experience most people don’t use certain chat addons that let you copy text from the ingame chat to paste it elsewhere and even if they would, it would be quite annoying to do this any time.
Is it even allowed to let third party software (like an addon in WoW) automatically use the Google translate software?

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396

I think it’s “GDR” in english.

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Why would we need it? We have a culture of dubbing/translating every movie, TV show, book, etc. in Germany. Some people don’t travel around, I’m 30 years old and never left my country. There are places that expect their employees to speak decent English, but not everyone works in hotels, other tourist-related places or in one of the two Irish pubs in my city. :wink:

Even the British soldiers here have to pick up at least a few German words to shop in their local Lidl market (“Hallo!”, “Mit Karte, bitte!”, “Dankeschön!”, “TschĂŒss!”) and they are a very isolated community with their own army-related working places, shops, doctors and even English kindergartens and schools for their children.

I don’t have much contact with tourists, but I visited a few small underground concerts here in Germany, like a few hundred people were there and we actually had visitors from France, Spain, Portugal, even the US and Canada.
Of course there were always Germans like me who could have conversations with them in English, but those were a minority!

Seriously, I talked to some guy from Spain or Portugal (forgot about it) at a small concert in Bielefeld. You could see how happy he was because he had ONE person to talk to. He was completely ISOLATED there because every attempt (at least the ones that I noticed and I stood right next to him during the concert) was responded with nervous stuttering of a few basic words. He could ask for the time, but there was no room for a decent conversation about mutual favourite bands, concert experiences and so on.
I felt really bad for him and I feel bad for every player on a mixed EU realm that is not able to have such conversations because this is Classic / Vanilla and it is all about the community!

We already have a Discord server for the German community to do exactly this.
At some point we had over 50 guild leaders online there. FIFTY! This is going to be huge and Blizzard are fools if they underestimate Classic, like they did with Vanilla back then in 2004.
The leaders of our German project are in contact with leaders of other language groups to make sure everyone has the chance to get their “own” server but many people don’t hang around in Forums or Discord servers before the game even started, so there will be people suffering because of it.
Sounds a bit evil, but we just make sure that it is not us.

Europeans are not a homogenous group.
Scandinavians speak much better English than Germans or French. You have people living in Elsass in France who actually have German as their first language. Countries like Switzerland or Belgium are divided in language zones.
It is not that easy.

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398

Neither is NA.

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To be fair, it is a LOT closer to homogenous, linguistically, than any other continent in the world, save Australia.

400

Of course not but I always get the impression that Americans think that Europe is more like a huge country, just like the USA.

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Don’t forget if it wasn’t for Sobieski you’d be all speaking Turk!

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To be fair, most of the countries in Europe are the size of states in the US.

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The America’s (correction: the US) speak primarily English, and Spanish. Thank the conquistadors. I’m a typical American. That is to say, a significant portion of my family isn’t native to the US and speaks at least one other language to some degree of proficiency. America is pretty familiar with language barriers. We get around 1 million immigrants each year, in addition to the illegal over stays.

I know EU has all these languages, and despite the fact that it’s normal to learn multiple languages due to the fact you live so close to each other for centuries, so it isn’t a big issue, yet for some reason none of you will be able to communicate in a video game.

I find that hard to believe as many other games and game systems have “megaservers” that also don’t split the population by language.

North America may be primary English, but it also has large groups of primary language speaking Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog (such as Filipino), German, Scandinavian, Russian, Brazilian (Portuguese), Arabic, Korean


About 430 languages just in the US alone.

However, the NA server isn’t just the US.

It will likely be host to many Oceanic, South American, and even EU players whose primary language is NOT English.

So what’s your problem?

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That’s so totally wrong
no one learns another language because he/she is living a few minutes away from border to another nation with a completely different language.
And why? Because we are not in direct contact.

It’s just like you never met the guy 70 houses down the street right around the corner
even if he is near to you. You don’t know him.
If you don’t work with people from different countries there is at least no need to learn the other language. It’s just like living in a bubble.

And yeah
as Yathrin said
in Germany EVERY product (except music) is translated.
Every show, every movie, every novel.
You just don’t have contact to the english language in normal day life.

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405

It is not really common to learn the languages of the countries that border yours, but it is really common to have multiple ethnic slurs and prejudices for the population of those countries. :smiley:

Of course, there are exceptions. The Dutch often speak German since those languages have so much in common, but they do speak far better English.
On the other hand, I don’t know a single German who speaks Dutch.

French is taught in German schools but not if you only get the basic education. Then it is only VERY BASIC English. If you want to get a university qualification you either have to learn additional languages like Spanish and Latin or you have to completely focus on natural sciences.

I know those games. I played a bit of ESO, Star Trek Online and other MMORPGs with megaservers. Do you know what the majority of Germans do in those games? They look for German guilds, play almost exclusively with them and communicate as less as possible with other people. Not because they hate them, but because some 50 year old guy who didn’t speak a word English in the last 30 years has problems with the language. Of course you can always learn, but learning a foreign language just for an MMORPG? Thats quite ambitious.

Even many younger people have problems with English. Most of them use a ridiculous amount of Anglicisms in German sentences and watch English Youtube videos but when they actually have to actively use this language they often can’t even write a whole sentence with proper grammar.
I saw it with my own eyes when a guy who is 10 years younger than me and has a better school graduation and IS CURRENTLY STUDYING AT THE UNIVERSITY could not use more than “Gamer English” when we did M+ with players from other countries. I played together with Russians with better English skills! :neutral_face:

I think we need higher standards for the communication in Classic WoW than we have for CS:GO. “Rush B! I SAID RRRUSH! DON’T STOP!” is not going to be a good foundation for a healthy Classic community.

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Not to mention
reading english is no problem for most of the people in europe (and even here a lot of them have problems with certain words that are not usually used).
Writing english is way harder.
But listening to a non-oxford native english speaker (maybe with slang) is so damn difficult for a lot of people that this would ruin the whole communication.

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No. It isn’t.

The English spoken by Americans, for example, is so foreign to the original English that many of the words and phrases are actually Spanish, Japanese, French, and so on.

If what you say is true, the adoption of words and phrases between cultures wouldn’t happen.

And English is actually a Germanic language. It isn’t native to the US or UK. It’s actually pretty easy to understand basic German phrases without any study of the language by a primary English speaker.

I can flip a channel on the tv and watch and listen to several languages from my couch.

Our personal experiences are entirely anecdotal anyway.

If you wish to isolate yourself from the world that is entirely up to you. There are plenty of opportunities to branch out if you wanted to.

They teach English in German schools. Not my fault if you do the minimum to scrap by class. (Don’t worry too much, our students have the same problem.)

Heck, they teach English in most schools around the entire world. What are you even trying to say?

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But this is exactly what the vast majority of the German Classic WoW players want, at least in WoW. We just need three servers from Blizzard for this. :smile:

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That’s like US players demanding an English server.

Or Mexican players demanding a Spanish server.

Or maybe let’s go back to that number I had. 430 languages in the US. Server for each one. Shouldn’t be a problem to do basic things in the game with populations diced up everywhere right?

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Please take me exactly.

I said no one learns another language just from the fact of living next to the border. (individual act)
I did not say that there is no exchange between cultures. (act of the crowd)

You also miss the point I made

It’s not about isolating
it is about that it is not necessary to learn and speak another language if you just stay in Germany. Even if everyone at least (except old GDR people) have learned basic english at school.

Isolating is an act of will to disagree to interact with everything outside.
That’s not the case at all. It’s more just like you don’t learn astro-physics if you just want to be a famous pop-star.
It’s not about ignoring or isolating. It is about necessity to do (learn/use/speak) that is not given.

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I don’t really understand why you guys don’t ask for this tbh.

How relevant are those languages in your country?
I’m pretty sure not very much people speak Texas German or Russian in the US.
No one over there in the Germans forums asks for Turkish servers for the Turkish immigrants in Germany. You have to be a bit more realistic and we are pretty sure that we can manage to have healthy populations on three German servers, four if they open a RP PvP server later on.

Even a subpar PvE private server like Nefarian, that has broken mechanics and bugs not fixed after YEARS, has the BC summon stones, had a completely broken herb and ore respawn mechanic that led to full flasked raids on farm days in MC and therefore buffed raid bosses to fight this problem, a server that sells premium memberships to pay for the server rent and has many problems with things not working as blizzlike as they could, a server that only managed to code and open AQ after 5 years (!), even this server managed to have a healthy population of about 1k German players every single evening and at the weekends.
1k players who raid MC and Ony for 5 years on a messy German private server. Many of the German Classic enthusiasts I met didn’t even touch a private server before the Nostalrius incident, because they find them either immoral, not reliable enough, not trustworthy or just don’t want to invest the effort to find one.

On our German community Discord server we had hundreds of people the last time I checked and this was days ago. At some point over 50 guild leaders were online at the same time.
I saw how people who advertised for very specific guilds like Austrian guilds with a focus on the Vienna area would get spammed with BattleNet friend requests so much, they had to tell the people that they have a hard time to answer all those people.
The casual guild I’m interested in had over 300 registered members on their Discord server last time I checked. And this is a guild that officially accepts OWLS in it’s raid team, it’s probably not going to be the most popular one. :wink:
I’m 100% sure that this is going to be a huge success, if Blizzard just give us a chance.

On the other hand I saw a lot of German players who posted screenshots or did just copy&paste the text to show they just cancelled their WoW subscription and many of them won’t play on a mixed EU realm. Some will look for a German private server for Classic (Nefarian is closing with the Classic release), others will move on to a German BC server, and some people will just quit WoW for good.

I’m not one of them and I hope the majority will stay and gather on 3 EU realms and build a German community there. But Blizzard will lose customers with this decision and they need to know this.

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Over 20.000 replies in the german thread now. And it’s still going on


https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/de/wow/t/wow-classic-struktur-der-europaeischen-realms/34048

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413

He who tosses the word “racist” is actually the racist. Enjoy your stupidity.

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