I'm sure this will probably receive negative reaction from some of Warlight's non native English speakers. However, there is an obvious need for a common language when playing team games.

Edited 4/17/2015 18:33:40

Well, if there were options to restrict games to other languages as well, I don't see a problem with this.

Its a world wide game man, you cant be mad at someone because they dont speak the same language as you

Well most people in Warlight are Americans or British so i dont really care anyway , if you do meet a non-english speaker use google translate.

*Looks at Pooncrew* HIPPIE ALERT!

But in all seriousness, such a system shouldn't be necessary but it really is for competitive play. I would think that most people wouldn't join a game where they don't understand any of the chat or even the title but it happens and it is annoying.

Well most people in Warlight are Americans or British so i dont really care anyway , if you do meet a non-english speaker use google translate.

Totally wrong, most people in Warlight are not Americans or British, they just do not use this forum which is 100% in English.
Anyway I agree with Pooncrew, and BTW English speakers, I played some only french-speaking or spanish-speaking games, you have also many clans where English is not the main language (YinYang clan with Chinese speakers, clan espanol, French community, Dutch, Brazil...).

Rather than restrict registration, leave the option to restrict individual games.

I'd suggest that you could restrict games to a language, but have more options than just english. Being able to speak to your team is very important, but there are a lot of people here who don't speak english as their first language/at all.

Its a world wide game man, you cant be mad at someone because they dont speak the same language as you

True, but it's pretty darn difficult to coordinate a team when people aren't even speaking the same language. That's why I agree with the idea of being able to restrict games to a specific language if desired.

You could just write something on the lines of "Join only if you can confidently understand English." in the game message.

I'm sure this will probably receive negative reaction from some of Warlight's non native English speakers. However, there is an obvious need for a common language when playing team games.

Eklipse {TJC}

- If there is an obvious need for common language, when playing the team game, and thus far there is at least I would say around 15% people who do not speak English not even in basic level, who cares about the negative reaction, regarding it would affect the 15% who probably are not the smartest as what on earth are you doing on 3vs3 game where the single and most important element is COMMUNICATION. Negative reaction against an OPTION not as rule, for custom people to add (I do not know in what way) filter for players to improve the rest 85% players enjoyability of the game? When I play in open-room and in multiplayer then my first concern is: can we speak in one language and second do they understand the basics of the game, which thus far can be limited by prerequisites.

Its a world wide game man, you cant be mad at someone because they dont speak the same language as you

Pooncrew

- Mad? After I read few threads and made the post I understood this forum is more of children´s chatroom rather than real discussion of a game. Seems no mods, nor admins here as well! So this proves everything. A little advice for you Pooncrew, what you should follow in real life as well. Think before you say something=because it might lack meaning and be nonsense. Mad and frustrated are different things. Second Word-wide-game, mad and same language = try to make logical connection beforehand. Just to derive an answer: I did not meant to restrict foreign players. Might as well add german, chinese, spanish or what-ever language restriction: just an idea to improve hosts option to create a game where one could play for certain, that his team-mates could at least speak and not work against him.

You could just write something on the lines of "Join only if you can confidently understand English." in the game message.

DanWL

- Are you just joking? Do you seriously mean that, If one does not speak the language he will definitely understand that? LogicNerd Army Strikes!


Well why on earth would you play if not for competitive gameplay. Its hard to find competitive in open-rooms. But at least we can try. And as I only mean it as prerequisite it dose not differ from Boot rate, level cap etc.

Edited 4/17/2015 21:25:41

Nid wyf yn deall, nid cyfieithu google peidio gweithio i chi?

As bad as this is I agree with a lot of what has been said about WarLight being a worldwide community with a multitude of languages, nationalities, and cultures, I do not think that this is a terribly bad thing to consider or at least look at. Though it is a sensitive topic, having the opportunity to play with like-language or like minded individuals would be an asset to reaching out and inclusion of those who may feel pushed away by english speakers.

HOWEVER

I don't think that it should be an option or anything within the programming or coding of WarLight. This is why we have clans, and a friend list. I think the best course of action would be to change the friends list to create sub-lists where you could play with others who share qualities, whether it be language, culture, religion, politics, or whatever, as you do. This way, you could create a sub-community with out taking away anything from the general population and without telling people they can not join because of their language, culture or whatever it is.

The other option would be to allow to join multiple clans. This would be more formal and allow for it to be more publicized and not as barebones exclusive.

you know, when you use google translate in conjunction with chat on this game, you open broad new vistas of opportunity and understanding... people should try it instead of bleating on about how their own trenchant monolingualism is everyone else's problem.

Idk I thought what I said was pretty concise, even Eklipse agreed with me...kinda....

If you could join multiple clans then clans would start to lose value.

you know, when you use google translate in conjunction with chat on this game, you open broad new vistas of opportunity and understanding... people should try it instead of bleating on about how their own trenchant monolingualism is everyone else's problem.

Pffftt...Google Translate is not and has never been accurate. It may work well with single words but when you start throwing in sentences and grammar the message gets muddled very quick.

I really don't understand why people get so offended on topics like this. There's nothing wrong with having/asking for a common language in certain games. (By the way, this isn't some "Ignorant English speakers" thing, I'd be perfectly fine with Spanish,Dutch,or whatever games being optional as well)

This is why we have clans, and a friend list. I think the best course of action would be to change the friends list to create sub-lists where you could play with others who share qualities, whether it be language, culture, religion, politics, or whatever, as you do

You are missing the point here. If I want to play competitive then of course I would choose players who I already know whether it is clan or friend list. I do think this game is in essence strategy-competitive style, not random click and conquer=get points and level up. And there is a flaw in the system, its bigger than just the language problem.

I am not against or discriminative, as I pointed out I do not care if there has multi option for different languages, second how many would really use it anyway? My aim is to eliminate the misunderstanding and lack of communication in team-games, which in this point is based on language. Second yeah, you might get away with google tranlator in multy-day games but real with 2-3 minute Rome map, it will fall short.

I will not even start pointing out the lack of moderation of this game´s community or forum. It seems thus far its slowly dying out. Trolling, playing deliberately against ones team, multi-accounts all are allowed. So it only seems that playing with friends is only option.

Culture, religion, politics - LOL. Is that really important for you when you play with someone?

But the smallest thing here to be done is the advance the friend list as pointed above by Master Ree - because I would like to tag people tolerable to play with and some as real friends. Same applies to the Blacklist. I blacklist people for various reasons, then I hardly can remember who for what? It would help me a lot if the Friend/Blacklist system could have better Tag system. or the Private note - which could be shortly maybe first 50 letters shown on profile, able to add colour tags aside of name so I could know the reason why I blacklisted someone.

To me it makes a different. Like If someone just left without reason, trolling, cant speak co-work as team, etc.

https://translate.google.com/

Problem solved

https://www.warlight.net/Forum/86370-suggestion-english-language-test-prerequisite?Offset=1

However, there is an obvious need for a common language when playing team games.

Agreed. What is not obvious to me is why you blindly assume this common language has to be English...

My counter-proposal is a little more involved, but it seems a lot more "non-Anglocentric" and, in general, a much more thorough solution. However, it suffers from one massive issue (which, I think, is pretty much inherent to this problem), see the last paragraph, even if you want to TL;DR the suggestion itself.

---

On the user profile, include an explanation like "Many WL games involve team play, coordination with other players and in general, communication with other players. Please select the languages which you speak well enough for these purposes."
(Displaying that text in English, as well as displaying the (crowd-sourced?) translation, if available, for the country that person is playing from and/or the country-specific extension on their email address, would mean only a very tiny number of people would not be able to understand what's being asked.)
Then include a list of languages, depicted by flags to prevent another can of worms, with checkboxes. (Don't use dropdowns, that's just asking for somebody to speak more languages than you've taken into account, as well as inviting people to rank all the languages they barely speak a few words of.)
Start with ten or twenty common languages and have an "other" field at the bottom, so people can enter requests for more languages. Add based on "enough popularity". Keep in mind there is no one-to-one mapping between languages and countries, so use that god-awful abomination of the US/UK-mixup flag if you insist, but whatever you do, don't have them as separate choices. Same with Standard Dutch and Flemish Dutch: anybody who speaks one of them will be able to communicate with somebody speaking the other, so just group them up. I personally have no idea whether Standard Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese should be separate (same issue with the various "flavours" of Spanish in Europe and Central/South America), but I bet the people who speak those languages can tell you.
On every game, have a dropdown for "chat language" (combined with a "Default language for newly created games" setting on our profiles). I'm not fully sure, but I'm inclined towards allowing this to be left open; I for one don't mind messing about with Google Translate. Then again, I nigh-exclusively play multiday games; I can imagine language problems being a more pressing issue in realtime games...

Then we're left with one crucial design decision: what to do with games where the set language doesn't match any of the languages the player claims to speak...? Hiding them altogether seems overly aggressive (and, will probably result in a lot of players just selecting all possible languages, including the ones they've never even heard of). Displaying a warning "The game creator has asked for chat to be in a language you don't speak, are you sure you want to join this game?" is too easy to ignore. Both approaches run the risk of rendering the entire system rather pointless... (Including an actual test, where people have to proof a sufficient command of a language seems completely unrealistic; if you want to suggest doing this, please explain how you envision it.)