Should PS2 have a Russian server?

[Meriv]

Originally Posted by Coveringfire

I played Star Wars: The Old Republic on release, me and my guild were placed on Tomb of Freedom Nadd(The devs placed guilds on certain servers to avoid over-population). Instead of sticking to their servers, the Russians, the Italians and the Spanish communities all decided to jump on this server making my time on the server thoroughly miserable as there was usually conversations in several different languages all going on at the same time in chat plus there were massive queues.

I really hope SOE give the Spanish, the Italians, the Russians etc. their own servers because otherwise they will flood English servers in large groups, and as soon as they mass in any sort of number then they stop talking in English and usually act rude & aggressive to those who are not of their nationality.

You can get a server with spanish and latin america, a server for russian and east europe but no solution for italians there isn't enought pop.

[Envenom]

If they implement the auto VOIP for squads/vehicles etc... like they said they are, having multiple languages is going to be a nightmare.

They need language based severs.

[OutlawDr]

It would be better if they all would learn English :\...and English is not my native language. Segregating the community into little language pockets is not good for health of the games population and longevity. Of course since this is a F2P and looks to kick ass, low population won't be a problem for any server in the beginning and long while after I would think.

I really hope SOE give the Spanish, the Italians, the Russians etc. their own servers because otherwise they will flood English servers in large groups, and as soon as they mass in any sort of number then they stop talking in English and usually act rude & aggressive to those who are not of their nationality.

Honestly, from what I've seen (and you can just go off the tone of the thread for an indication) the same is afforded to them. People get annoyed when someone else doesn't speak their language. Non-English speakers often get chastised for not speaking English (again, this thread) or even for not speaking it well. Its no wonder language groups huddle together and lash out. Not saying its all one sides fault, but it takes two to tango in this case.

[Pride]

Honestly I wouldn't mind an EU West/Eu East split like in League.

In my experience Russians bring a lot of problems to the table, high ping, the language barrier and a lack of willingness to participate with the Western Europe community being just a few. I think both them and the west would appreciate such an intervention. Saying that however there is a minority that do like to integrate with us western folk, that speak English and want to communicate. SOE should avoid forcing them onto the East server but the option should definitely exist for those that want it.

[Meriv]

Originally Posted by Envenom

If they implement the auto VOIP for squads/vehicles etc... like they said they are, having multiple languages is going to be a nightmare.

They need language based severs.

It will be a funny nightmare, i already imagine myself screaming RIght! or LEFT! in 3-4 languages lol

[I SandRock]

Originally Posted by OutlawDr

Honestly, from what I've seen (and you can just go off the tone of the thread for an indication) the same is afforded to them. People get annoyed when someone else doesn't speak their language. Non-English speakers often get chastised for not speaking English (again, this thread) or even for not speaking it well. Its no wonder language groups huddle together and lash out. Not saying its all one sides fault, but it takes two to tango in this case.

Hmm this isn't really a fair comparison. I'm dutch, that's my native language, yet I have the decency to speak English in public, even when there are other dutch people in my group. If they want to speak dutch to me I tell them they can whisper me. It's simple decency. If somebody speaks broken english to me I don't complain or mock them I respect their effort. Yet it seems a lot of these people can only speak english when they want to insult you

English is simply the 'language of the internet'. They huddle together, they aren't forced to. I've seen a 12 year old swedish boy speak english and interact in an international guild just fine with his broken english.
It's fine if you want to be in a nationalist guild/outfit and speak that language among them just have the decency to use English in public chat.

But the problem isn't small pockets, a few outfits, it's when 40%+ of a server is one nationality that doesn't speak English that it leads to problems for the other 'half'. And with Russians being such a huge playerbase in F2P games there will definitely be at least one server which has a majority of Russian players once it becomes the 'unofficial' russian server. To prevent that, SOE needs to have Russian servers from the start. Otherwise you going to end up alienating a large part of a server which has to go and reroll on a new server to have a normal game experience..

[Stew]

yes they should !

[Blackwolf]

Originally Posted by Pella

What gave you the idea to make this complete rubbish up.

Russian players are amongst the words best online gamers next to the Koreans. Big flight e-sports are dominated by Russians.

APB was hacked to hell by all players. Not just Russians.

And more to the point Russians should be welcomed on the European servers with a local client.

Not to be rude or disrespectful, I happen to like Russians. But I think the language barrier is a bit much to tolerate.

I hate it when people spam chat of any kind with information I can't read. And being an ignorant heathen bastard that I am, I never studied a second language. So having seperate servers based on language would, in my opinion, be awesome.

How Russians play and what they choose to do? I don't care. They are players and players all play the same to me. What they say, however, makes a difference to me.

[Galapogos]

I don't think servers should be based on language. Hopefully the mission system will be simple enough to understand that it will help coordinate players regardless of what language they speak. This would not solve the problem of Russian outfits isolating themselves, but the grief system should keep tking to a minimum, and I doubt that Russians will be able to hack and get away with it any easier than anyone else, unless Russians are the best hackers in the world.

[metziih]

It would be nice if the servers were language based.

[TeaLeaf]

I reckon the russians should have their own server. For the simple reason that a large portion of russians don't or won't speak english, while almost everyone in western europe will be using it as the "common" language and none of us speak russian.

I'm not sure how much truth their is to the reputations of Russians being slightly unpleasant online but the language barrier plus geography and population issues means it's just easier to give them their own server(s).

I'm sure there will be loads of servers anyway, each one can only support like 12000 players so I can easily see at least 5 or 6 in europe.

[HenchAnt]

Originally Posted by velleity

Speakers of Germanic languages invariably cheat and talk funny. Especially Frisian. Hope those bastards get their own Frisian-only ghetto server instead of crapping up my comms with their animal grunting.

Who cares about Frisians. Get the Bavarians to a ghetto server. Biergartens and Weißwursts might clash with Sci-fi immersion. (And ensure the Swiss get on the German Server, but have to play VS: "Wer hat's erfunden? Die VS!")

On a more serious note: I want my battles massive, so I hope the servers to be as big as possible. So the more nations on a server, the merrier.

There are quite a few nationalities that have a tendency to cling together and talk their language in public chat, especially once a certain treshold of players is reached. On the WoT EU server for example, the French, Polish and Germans are notorious for this.
It`s no surprise that given the the number of people from Russian language states, "Russians" reach this treshold sooner (about 300 Million in former sowjet states, compared to about 80 Million Germans, 60 Million French and 40 Million Poles). But it's simply not a "Russian problem".

And given the positive experience with Werner or Eve Online, I don't see a problem. In the end, it comes down to how strong the international community is for a game. For Planetside2, a lot will depend on communication between outfits - on the forums, and during the game.
A negative example would be WoT, where the community is quite fractured, and the game gives no incentive to cross language barriers to work together.

[Figment]

I wouldn't want to EXCLUDE anyone from any server, however, it's possible that a Russian server wouldn't be an entirely bad idea. Primarily for ping reasons.



However, I'd also point you to World of Tanks. Unfortunately in that game, it turned out that Russians can be extremely territorial, more so than other nationalities: a lot of the younger, more immature Russians seem extremely nationalistic and consider the test server to be Russian Only, team killing anyone with the automatic EU tag. Now, that's not the majority of Russians, but it's a more significant percentage than for others. The question is, do they act like this because they're more self-centered, or because they never experienced an international community and in some cases have a poor grasp of English? I'd say it's a little bit of all. You could see it in PS1 with the Russian outfits being quite nationalistic and reclusive in setup compared to other outfits. There were definitely individuals you'd have contact with, but as a group (like the CN) they kinda... stuck to themselves.


Similarly, a larger group of eastern European players (former Warschau pakt countries) have a different internet etiquette from western players, who have more experience in online gaming and participating in an international community (especially goes for the young players who only recently got full access to the net). These people seem more focused on their own language and countrymen and more 'nationality aware' it seems, which is probably a recent history thing. Only been a generation or two since they were free from Russian dominance, after all.

Again, this doesn't go for all by far, but I've never heard a Dutch or Belgian person yell in chat that they're not going to learn English unless the English learn Dutch. I have however, on many occassions heard Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Romenian players yell in broken English that people should learn their language if they're to communicate, because they won't have another language colonising or dominating their language or impose on them (read: like Russian tried before), next to simply ignoring other people and talking in public in the own language which to many is considered rude behaviour (they don't seem to realise that though). So that was an unexpected experience to me anyway, certainly on a relatively regular basis.

It doesn't occur to them that the sole reason English is prefered is because 90% of Europeans at least comprehends it, opposed to a lower percentage of people that know German and even less that know French. Have however seen matches predominantly spoken in German.

Every single World of Tank match, you hear people go "siemka", "Cz?" or "Serb?" and if they find a countryman they'll go "blablabla " in their own language. Great if it were /tells, not so great if it is /comallplayers or /comallfriendlies. It can be annoying and distracting and it's very bad for communication, community unity and teamwork. (sometimes feels like the Tower of Babel in WoT).

In that sense VoiP could get quite funny with all the languages involved.

[Dreamcast]

It will be cool if Planetside put a google translater app on the game so we can understand other languages.

[HenchAnt]

Originally Posted by Dreamcast

It will be cool if Planetside put a google translater app on the game so we can understand other languages.

Given that Planetside2 will use voice chat, I doubt that current translator software will be of much use.