That can be a fine line, of course. As long as it’s internally consistent then a written accent, dialect, or non-perfect grammar can be good to get across a character. However, a lot of it may be unintentional and inconsistent, which can be jarring to read.
I would say that non-standard English should be used sparingly so the few examples stand out as intentional. It helps in both copy-editing the text and when players later encounter the text.
Punctuation, on the other hand, should be as close to correct as possible. It represents the natural flow and intent of conversation, mixing it up means that people aren’t reading your text as it was intended. Unless you intended to make your text confusing to read in the first place…
I’d argue that is already accomplished, if the main things people are complaining about is “Raven’s” vs “ravens”. People clearly understand it. But they are typos, that should be fixed.
They are also considered extremely minor/non important bugs, that are much further down the food chain of things to be fixed.
I understand your point.
Sorry have to go just logged on to computer to check weather ended up getting caught up on the forums.
Bad storms coming through.
As a person that worked in QA for 2 years, it means they are fixing the deeper, more complex issues.
Example, when I first started and I was in general QA (worked at EA. Don’t hate me), a text issue bug was considered a “Class D” issue. Which is the furthest down the totem pole you cold get.
Class A were game crashes.
Class B were things that stopped play, but didn’t necessarily crash the game
Class C were things more important than text issues, less important than B
Class D were non important things that different effect game play at all, like text errors.
Yes, they all need to be fixed, but Class D were the least important, and were gotten to when nothing else was needed.
And lets be real, 8.2 launch has had the deeper more complex issues that needed to be fixed at a higher priority than quest text.
actually, by blizzards own standards, i’m amazed that there isn’t an apostrophe in both versions… regardless of which is correct.
if you read quest texts, this is a very common mistake… but after having a bit of a back and forth with various reps, there was apparently some reasoning behind why this happens, and how nearly all possessives are managed like this.
(it was years ago… i can’t recall the “why”, but it wasn’t really a good reason)
That would mean they are using the same QA and development team for all parts of the game. Instead, a good game company splits it up into sections. There should be an engine development and QA, a network dev and QA, quest and lore dev and QA, art dev and QA, and so on. And then a final QA that tests the entire package.
The team that comes up with the lore and quest text should have proofreaders and copy editors that catch these sort of errors before they ever get out of their department. That so many make it to the final game indicates there isn’t a focus on quality at all, most likely extending to other aspects of the game.
Yeah, except that isn’t how real life works. Maybe in a perfect system you can have 50 different QA departments, but that isn’t how it works in practice.
Text issues will always been see as low priority, because it doesn’t effect gameplay. In every company.
Giving the same amount of weight/time to an unimportant issue, as an important issue, is a recipe for losing money.
I’d say text issues in non video game software are a much larger issue than text issues being referenced here. There text is important and vital. Here it isn’t.
Blizzard is a C-tier developer these days. You shouldn’t expect too much from them, especially after they literally canned their QA department. It also doesn’t help that this patch was obviously rushed out the door to compete with FFXIV.
Yep. And they also don’t listen to bug feedback from their betas/PTR. It’s painfully obvious that Blizzard is no longer the great developer they once were.
True, but there are people who still believe that Blizzard is the AAA dev they once were. It doesn’t help that even though BFA has been universally panned, people are saying they’re “quitting until Classic” while being too dumb to realize that Blizzard doesn’t care if you’re playing Classic instead, as long as they keep getting their money.
Nothing is ever going to change and the good days of Blizzard are sadly just a fading memory at this point.
![:confounded:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/confounded.png?v=6" ":confounded:")