Tipster Nimm writes in to let us know that
several EU battlegroups have been having serious issues after mergers that occurred post-patch 3.02. The mergers have seen a number of battlegroups acquiring servers with other language-dominant populations, which has resulted in a number of French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian-dominant servers (among others) all in the same battlegroups. While this is probably necessary to a certain degree to guarantee equal Alliance/Horde populations for quick queue times, it's become something of a communication nightmare in battleground matches, particularly those with lots of players using Cyrillic characters. As the player Thoughtless from the Karazhan realm asks,
"Can you imagine how hard it is to organise any sort of teamplay in AB with player ???????? from <????????> guild cha(t)ting "?????? ??? ??????? ??????? ?????" in BG chat?" Nimm also notes that differentiating between ??????? enemy players is a nightmare.
We knew that
Blizzard was closing four EU realms (Stonemaul, Molten Core, Shadowmoon, and Warsong) and transferring remaining players to other realms in response to Russian player migration to
Russian realms opened late summer 2008, and the problem's partially the result of that (which has already resulted in the inevitable "In Soviet Russia, battlegroups merge you" joke). A few amused people are rising to the occasion by translating such phrases as
inc 5 schmiede (inc 5 blacksmith in German) or proposing a revival of Esperanto, but the Russian language pack would be the only possible solution for the ???? problem. There's been mention made that this is only a temporary fix on Blizzard's part to faction imbalances on battlegroups, but if you're on an EU realm that's seen a recent battlegroup merge, just be aware that Babelfish might be a useful tool in the near future.
Tags: battlegroup, battlegroups, eu, eu-realms, eu-servers, french, german, languages, localization, molten-core, patch-3.0.2, portuguese, realm-closure, realm-news, realms, russia, russian, shadowmoon, spanish, stonemaul, warsong, wow-europe
Filed under: Realm News, Odds and ends, News items, PvP, Forums, Battlegrounds, Arena
Oct 16th 2008 at 8:00PM 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Nightshifter Oct 16th 2008 8:08PM
I suspect a Unicode character patch may be coming for those realms. Of course the ?????? ????????????? may be easier to target for someone who doesn't know Cyrillic.
Cow Oct 16th 2008 8:19PM
This is not a permanent change.
There was an error during patch application that caused several battlegroups to merge with foreign ones.
This has been fixed, as we were offline for 4-5 hours this evening due to 'Emergency Maintenance'.
And now we're back up again--whaddya know. No more germans in our BGs.
Cow Oct 16th 2008 8:39PM
FYI, 'we' refers to 4 battlegroups. I forget which, but Conviction (mine) was affected.
offday Oct 16th 2008 8:24PM
I noticed something similar to this. Some NPC guards in Auberdine seemed to be speaking another language. I didn't really think anything of it at the time.
Faar Oct 16th 2008 8:33PM
"just be aware that Babelfish might be a useful tool in the near future"
Yeah - I'll signal that rogue whom I saw riding towards me and then jumping into stealth to hold off cheap shotting me and stunlocking me to death so I can alt-tab over to firefox and copy-paste that string of german gibberish my teammate just spouted...
Weevil Oct 16th 2008 8:46PM
Yeah - Nightfall appears to have been returned to normal now. The Spanish players were very friendly, but to the point of sitting and chatting rather than doing any actual PVP : D
Drae Oct 16th 2008 9:40PM
Reckoning (me), Ruin, Conviction and .... now i want to say Bloodlust? but i dunno if i just made that up, something beginning with B at any rate i think the germans werent quite so hospitable in AV, apparently the majority of them wanted to kill us instead of the horde cause they were getting so annoyed with us! xD
Driphter Oct 16th 2008 9:54PM
Europeans get all the fun :(
~Driphter
Ice ice Oct 17th 2008 5:22AM
Indeed we do. After patch there has been server, battlegroup crashes all day long, even now. Still some latency issues that are "to be resolved". We were doing kara and wohoo server offline middle of it. Gj blizzard.. and since I havent heard problems with us servers.. screw you guys :D
btw offtopic:
Weapon enchants now work in druid forms! Yes, I tried fiery and it freaking worked.
Anomis Oct 17th 2008 12:36AM
"French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian-dominant servers (among others)"
What do you mean Portuguese realms?
Cow Oct 17th 2008 12:55AM
Portuguese-DOMINANT.
Axolotl Oct 17th 2008 2:41AM
majis = horde that much i could make out from the screenie ...
Yeah, I saw the jibberish even while walking through orgrimar, woot new horde lingo ;-p
mankso Oct 17th 2008 2:52AM
>or proposing a revival of Esperanto,
What's all this about 'revival'?! Esperanto never died, as you can see from this calendar of daily events around the world:
http://www.eventoj.hu/kalendar.htm
or even listen to in daily broadcasts from Radio Polonia:
http://www.polskieradio.pl/eo/
and other sources. Babelfish and similar translators are only good for the vaguest of approximations. 'Universal bilingualism' [YOUR ethnic language + non-ethnic Esperanto for all] is an alternative well worth looking into, and will quickly repay the investment of only 10-20 hours.
Cow Oct 17th 2008 10:52AM
Thanks for the laugh.
tatarynowicz Oct 25th 2008 12:59PM
Yeah, if only we had a common language we all knew and used... Oh well, I guess until then we'll have to keep using that 'English' tongue I hear so much about.
mankso Oct 25th 2008 1:42PM
Unfortunately so, tatarynowicz! - and with all the glottophagous consequences, unearned privileges and discriminatory practices that go along with using someone's ethnic languages as an interlanguage, instead of something non-ethnic that puts us all on the same, level, linguistic playing- field. How do the 7 points of the Prague Manifesto grab you?:
http://lingvo.org
bdew Oct 17th 2008 3:40AM
If you really want you can get a set of fonts for wow that support russian here - http://wow.playhard.ru/Files/Fonts.zip can be installed on any version (locale) of the client.
They do screw up renedering of european letters that are not in english.
gief unicode wow plx!
Hotball Oct 17th 2008 4:46AM
I think there's something funny about WoW's unicode support. The texts are clearly in Unicode, but the program itself is not in Unicode (you can see they put the "unicows.dll" file, which is used to support Windows 98 for unicode enabled programs). Since WoW does not support Windows 98 anymore, I think they should just make it a direct unicode enabled program.
Anyway, the ??? situation is quite weird. In Taiwanese version, we have many players from China and they use simplified Chinese, but they are still displayed correctly. However, if you try to type simplified Chinese, all you get is ????. Interestingly, if you use AppLocale (a program provided by Microsoft to temporarily change code page for a program) to change the code page to simplified Chinese, then you can type simplified Chinese.
Blorg Oct 17th 2008 5:16AM
I'd be surprised if Horde in European battlegrounds could cooperate less than they do currently, even if every single player spoke their own unique moon language.
People can ignore "will you stop farming honour in midfield and help" and "fight at the flags not out in the middle of nowhere" just as easily if it's typed in Greek, Swahili or Martian.
Elmo Oct 17th 2008 5:37AM
indeed there were French servers in the Rampage Battlegroup somehow.
I've seen the servers Drek'thar and Conceil des Ombres in a English Battlegroup :P