Turbine, Please let us chat in other language in the game! It's unfair!

[~???]

First, My English is not well-skilled, so there're some points you would be difficult to understand.



There are a lot people to enjoy Dungeon and Dragon Online, and That includes non-English users(not British or American). Especially, You should have an experience to meet players who might be which one of Chinese, Japanese or Korean and so on like Russian... They don't use English generally. But most of them are incapable of chatting with their own language, because the game doesn't show certain characters as the font in the game has not the characters of those languages except for English, Greek, Russian(Cyrillic). It's really unfair. why not us?

I'm a Korean. You can see I can do well as English with no problem. yes, I'm no problem with you guys to converse. but I have many problem to converse with Koreans, my country buddies. We can HARDLY converse each other as there's no characters to express our language well. many people from other countries(Like Chinese, Japanese) have also same problem to this tragedy with being unconversational. This problem made also other problem that people who was troubled in this gonna leave from the game. so I lost some of my friends because of this, They left the game.

This problem is not from input system, It's because of font in the game. We can type as our languages well, but typed word becomes "??????." you can see a screenshot below... I don't think putting new characters to the font doesn't cost terribly, but this would make new people who have potentials to purchase the game. at least you can have that reason to do this.

So, Turbine. Could you please add the font into the game for us? Adding new characters into current font would not be high cost to do. even you made Cyrillic of Russian and Greek Letters. It's unfair.
or by the other word, can you make us happy as the token of that we didn't not give up your game? we have royalties for your game... Please, font please.



I put some Q&A below, as I might forget to write something important in that word above.


[1] I can't understand what problem you have.
See the screenshot below.

http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/6642/characterse.png

*I changed font size to 16 from 14, to make the legibility of that. Default size is 14.
*I can't change or add font by that function. only developers can do that.

as you can see, everything which is not in the font appears as ??????. but we can type at least.
while Greek and Russian have no problem... :/


[2] You can use Voice chat by the in-game system or MUMBLE.
That's not a proper solution. It forces everyone to have a microphone to voice, and It's not that everyone must have a microphone. have you a microphone always?
Plus, There's a problem to hear something like me. It's personal problem, but It would be a reason.


[3] They should require many human resource or companial capital to make them able to chat.
Yes, It's true that They'd take the cost to do. but I don't think the cost of doing that is not really "MANY." It's just to put new characters into the current game font. They don't need to change their character input system, It works already well for every character.


[4] They should change their character input system.
It's not the problem about input system. It's about the font. Cyrillic(of Russian) and Greek letters are in the game font already, even Turbine never offered any service for Russia and Greek directly.


[5] Exactly, What's that word of "We" you wrote?
We -Korean, Chinese and Japanese- are at same position about this problem. We took the game service once, but that game service was gone long time ago. even Turbine didn't offer service directly, but did it by national localizing to permit the publishers. We had our own national servers, and we moved to English Servers after our national servers gone because the publishers was incapable to operate the game service.


[6] Why should Turbine do that for you?
Yeah, They don't have any must to do that. It's true. We're the weak. even what I'm doing(like writing this) is same to cry to the midair. They would not add the new characters into the font even if we complained about this. but It's a serious problem of expression which ppl should do generally without trouble, and We'd get that problem due to the lack of the font. We want at least they'd solve this unbelievable tradegy.

By the way, This would bring more players who has a potential to purchase the game. This can make a great effect by costing less. at least this can be a reason.


[7] So what's the solution?
I wrote it already, will write it again here. Adding the unadded characters into the current font of the game.


[8] You could write this on suggestion&idea forum.
Generally, developers don't answer anything of that forum. so, getting their answer easily is writing this on general board, where there's a high chance that developers would remain an answer.


[9] I think There aren't many foreigners enough to do this.
They don't use the forum well, but I hope they would make many posts on this, to prove that work is worth.



P.S. New forum system made my nickname worse. :(

[Kilbar]

Don't take this the wrong way, but if Turbine ignores and treats with casual contempt those of us who speak their native language (and they do) what hope do you really think you've got here?

[~???]

Don't take this the wrong way, but if Turbine ignores and treats with casual contempt those of us who speak their native language (and they do) what hope do you really think you've got here?

I just want Turbine to see then answer this at least. If they disagreed, we would lost any hope about this anymore, agreed, we'd get happy. That's it. I don't think this'd make natives getting contempt. Why would that happen?




I'm going to be the bad guy here but no just no. I've thought about this since your last post, every game I've seen that has those extra fonts they're used primarily to spam chat channels with garbage to grief english speakers. You're asking something to be put in that would grief the majority of the playerbase.

/not signed.

I'm not sure what made you to think like that. what? used to spam? I don't chat as my language generally for public. I do only while I'm in the korean party or in the guild chat. pluse, I've never seen anything like that unpleasurable happen. Is it serious enough to call it as garbage for you and ppl?

[Charononus]

I'm not sure what made you to think like that. what? used to spam? I don't chat as my language generally and spam. I do only while I'm in the korean party or in the guild chat. pluse, I've never seen anything like that unpleasurable happen. Is it serious enough to call it as garbage for you and ppl?

You talking to others that speak the language is not garbage but to give you an example I played eve for a while and it had many language fonts included. A typical example of how it was used was people typing something

"ha ha you are all noobs i am god, you suck ext ext ext."

This would however have much more vulgarity that I've edited out. The person would then spam this over and over again.

The reason I know what was being said at that point was that I used google translate to figure out what was being said out of curiousity. This is all these additional fonts would create imo, you'd have five or six happy people per server and 100's irritated by spam.

[~???]

You talking to others that speak the language is not garbage but to give you an example I played eve for a while and it had many language fonts included. A typical example of how it was used was people typing something

"ha ha you are all noobs i am god, you suck ext ext ext."

This would however have much more vulgarity that I've edited out. The person would then spam this over and over again.

The reason I know what was being said at that point was that I used google translate to figure out what was being said out of curiousity. This is all these additional fonts would create imo, you'd have five or six happy people per server and 100's irritated by spam.

everqeust? oh. I know that tragedic case. I played with no problem of conversation, but someday, SOE blocked non-english font... I don't know why they had to do, but ppl says It's because someone was spamming with his language rudely for public. after this case, almost ppl left. It was not except for me to leave.
so I suggested a substitutional way that to chat as other language only in the guild channel or custom channel chat... then they would be not able to spam with weird characters of their language, even they would do as English. :/ I thought that when I wrote this on Idea&Suggestion forum first. some natives accepted that and you would be acceptable with this substitutional way at least. ;)

[cru212]

Would it be possible to somehow replace the Verdana font on your computer with e.g. Arial Unicode MS or whatever font that can correctly display your national characters.

Or perhaps check out the ini file if the font name is mentioned there - and replace it with something else. Worth trying.

[~???]

Would it be possible to somehow replace the Verdana font on your computer with e.g. Arial Unicode MS or whatever font that can correctly display your national characters.

Or perhaps check out the ini file if the font name is mentioned there - and replace it with something else. Worth trying.

I tried with OS Font, ini and some game file but It looks like the font is internal in the game... also I thought hooking from the game chat... even I have no skill about that. :/

[~droid_327]

Non-Latin characters wont be added, because the mods cant moderate posts in Chinese or Korean or whatever characters. Unless they want to hire native Asian language speaking mods (which they dont), there's no way to prevent Chinese spam and other chat channel abuses.Also, it doesnt unite the playerbase, it divides it up into groups of players that dont communicate with each other. Many Internet gamers abroad DO speak some English, so giving them the crutch of, say, Korean character support, with a bunch of Korean guildmates, ensures that they never have to interact with any native English players on their server.Lastly, all that being said, you CAN still transliterate any language into Latin characters. It may not be ideal, but if you really really want to talk in Korean...dangsin-eun geugeos-eul hal ??su issseubnida :)

[Kilbar]

You're Korean, you say? I'm American and I just wanted to say that one of your countrymen is a personal hero of mine. Admiral Yi Sun-sin is seven distinct flavors of awesome.

[~droid_327]

1) You can still transliterate any language into Latin characters2) Its impossible for mods to moderate communication in alphabets they're illiterate in. There's no way Turbine could stop Chinese or Korean spam and other chat-channel abuses. At least transliterated phrases can be easily Google-translated to get the general idea of what its saying.3) There's no reason for Turbine to empower players to never communicate with each other. Many Internet gamers DO speak English, and as a lingua franca in DDO it helps ensure players are interacting with the whole community, not just forming enclaves with their countrymates.

[~???]

Non-Latin characters wont be added, because the mods cant moderate posts in Chinese or Korean or whatever characters. Unless they want to hire native Asian language speaking mods (which they dont), there's no way to prevent Chinese spam and other chat channel abuses.Also, it doesnt unite the playerbase, it divides it up into groups of players that dont communicate with each other. Many Internet gamers abroad DO speak some English, so giving them the crutch of, say, Korean character support, with a bunch of Korean guildmates, ensures that they never have to interact with any native English players on their server.Lastly, all that being said, you CAN still transliterate any language into Latin characters. It may not be ideal, but if you really really want to talk in Korean...dangsin-eun geugeos-eul hal ??su issseubnida :)

excuse me, what's DO speak?
and, yes. we use transliterating already, but that made once discord of conversation to let one of guildie leave from the guild.

[Kilbar]

excuse me, what's DO speak?
and, yes. we use transliterating already, but that made once discord of conversation to let one of guildie leave from the guild.

DO is do capitalized for emphasis.

[~droid_327]

excuse me, what's DO speak?Many gamers do speak English, I meant, just emphasis on the "do". Some gamers dont, many gamers do.

[~???]

You're Korean, you say? I'm American and I just wanted to say that one of your countrymen is a personal hero of mine. Admiral Yi Sun-sin is seven distinct flavors of awesome.

DO is do capitalized for emphasis.

yes. He is awesome one of heroes from whole Korean history, and ever admirable.
and thanks to teach me. I thought something short-form of a word.. :/

[~lusteen]

/signed
add the fonts.

i wont understand a thing but *reading* (looking at) another alphabet is already traveling for me.
no wonder we are enthraled by *elven*, *dwarven* runes...

the 2 foreign languages i picked up at school beside english were russian & greek, *because* they were so mysterious.

by the way, i do love to learn a word or two from a foreign language, part of traveling from my armchair thing.
be nice, learn to say *hi* in as many languages as you can, its an bondmaker.

[Kilbar]

I could gush for ages about Admiral Yi. He's probably the greatest naval mind in human history. Makes Lord Nelson look like a seasick landlubber.

[~Normalerweise]

Would it be possible to somehow replace the Verdana font on your computer with e.g. Arial Unicode MS or whatever font that can correctly display your national characters.

Good point. The fonts already exists on most machines. It shouldn't be too difficult for the devs to add a Unicode font to the game, unless the game code cannot yet handle Unicode strings. I would think the presence of Cyrillic and Hellenic characters in game indicate Unicode is supported, but I could be wrong.

[~???]

1) You can still transliterate any language into Latin characters
Yes, you said It's not ideal way, and It's right. but unlike chinese and japanese, Korean is terribly unproper for transliterating. You wrote "dangsin-eun geugeos-eul halsu issseubnida" but generally we wrote it as "dang sin un hal su it sup ni da" and It has something incomprehensibility, plus we don't write that, do it as "hal su it um" simply. but something important or difficult to explain is getting bad to understand and write. while japanese and chinese use English to make their words at least, so their situation is better than Korean...


2) Its impossible for mods to moderate communication in alphabets they're illiterate in. There's no way Turbine could stop Chinese or Korean spam and other chat-channel abuses. At least transliterated phrases can be easily Google-translated to get the general idea of what its saying.
maybe I might agree about Chinese spam if I was on Sarlona, but I've never seen spam complainable or something about Korean. and I'm not sure about Chinnese, but transliterated korean words are not translatable ever by machine translator. because Korean has complexity of language...? whatever, It's difficult for machine translator.


3) There's no reason for Turbine to empower players to never communicate with each other. Many Internet gamers DO speak English, and as a lingua franca in DDO it helps ensure players are interacting with the whole community, not just forming enclaves with their countrymates.
I don't know this really make players incoummunicate each other. yes. English is almost lingua franca, but that dosen't mean everyone must be able to use that.
I met and played with a french player who doesn't know English once. but everyone in the party needed to chat french(by google translator.. lol) to speak him something to prevent him making terrible situation like messing a puzzle..

[marciosilva]

As a portuguese user, I have no problems in writing western european characters even when our typical accents don't work. Here are a few examples:

?* and á [I can write an a instead]
õ [can use o]
ê [can use e]

And so on. I don't remember now, but I think I do see those characters in-game. Need to try it later to be sure. Just out of curiosity, do you guys see these characters here in the forums? I always write in english so I never noticed that. I do see them here in my computer, but most people may use other codifications.

Anyway, I agree with the OP. Makes sense if the game could use the already installed fonts. Less hassle and more happy customers. More happy customers = more money into Turbine bank account. Simple :D

last minute edit: the character in red does not show up correctly. Should be an A with an accent like the other green A, but on the opposite direction. Never saw one accent appear and the other don't...

[TrinityTurtle]

Has anyone considered setting up a teamspeak or some other free service (whatever the Korean version of such is?) to use to communicate? TeamSpeak allows both verbal and written communication, and I would think would be easy for user to install their fonts if they're not already there.

It's not a perfect solution, it would require a separate program on the side that people would have to call up to see the text only users, but it is a much better voice chat program and has a lot of benefits to offer (like being able to individually adjust the sound on my end so I can turn loud mics down and soft ones up). And since it's unlikely that the font will be installed at this time, I suggest it because I personally would want workaround solutions offered to me, and I mean no disrespect nor do I address whether it's 'fair' or not between WB/Turbine and non-English users. I prefer practicality to philosopy. :)

[~Normalerweise]

One of the things I enjoy most about DDO is the diversity of its player base. When so many people of such varied cultures can get together to have a good time, it makes the world seem a friendlier place.

If I see text in chat that I don't understand, I have two options: Ignore it, or research it. I find the latter to be more fun.

[~???]

I could gush for ages about Admiral Yi. He's probably the greatest naval mind in human history. Makes Lord Nelson look like a seasick landlubber.

There's a book named as A Diary during War(Nanjung ilgi) he wrote. We can see his normal being side from that as he wrote some lines we can know he got despaired and... something bad feeling. but even he didn't run away from his challenge, I would suicide perhaps, If I was. because of this, I pay my tribute of praise for him really.


/signed
add the fonts.

i wont understand a thing but *reading* (looking at) another alphabet is already traveling for me.
no wonder we are enthraled by *elven*, *dwarven* runes...

the 2 foreign languages i picked up at school beside english were russian & greek, *because* they were so mysterious.

by the way, i do love to learn a word or two from a foreign language, part of traveling from my armchair thing.
be nice, learn to say *hi* in as many languages as you can, its an bondmaker.

I want to write HI in Korean, but input or font system of new forum looks got trouble. :/
Politely "Annyonghaseyo", and simply "annyong" as possible as I can.

btw, I learned Russian characters once like the reason of you. It's looks like upsided-down English alphabet.. so fun. lol

[~???]

Has anyone considered setting up a teamspeak or some other free service (whatever the Korean version of such is?) to use to communicate? TeamSpeak allows both verbal and written communication, and I would think would be easy for user to install their fonts if they're not already there.

It's not a perfect solution, it would require a separate program on the side that people would have to call up to see the text only users, but it is a much better voice chat program and has a lot of benefits to offer (like being able to individually adjust the sound on my end so I can turn loud mics down and soft ones up). And since it's unlikely that the font will be installed at this time, I suggest it because I personally would want workaround solutions offered to me, and I mean no disrespect nor do I address whether it's 'fair' or not between WB/Turbine and non-English users. I prefer practicality to philosopy. :)

yeah, already suggested about IRC(voice chat is not needed as there's in game system.), and noticed a function which keep it the front of windows. but They don't use that because It's difficult to use... I thought It's greatest solution ever, but... *sigh*

[marciosilva]

I would go a step ahead, they need to correct fonts used here in the forum too, if I'm not mistaken.

I don't have a clue on how to call the OP name. The only thing I see are 3 interrogation marks "???" as his name.

I wonder if this is more embarassing for Turbine or for this user.

*sigh :(

[~Bagtit_Ni_Sarlona]

One of the things I enjoy most about DDO is the diversity of its player base. When so many people of such varied cultures can get together to have a good time, it makes the world seem a friendlier place.

If I see text in chat that I don't understand, I have two options: Ignore it, or research it. I find the latter to be more fun.

Completely agree here, I am in A Filipino guild, 99% of my guild mates are in the Philippines (Play on Sarlona obviously). Although they can and do speak English, we normally speak and type in Tagalog. Now I am French Canadian, my wife is Filipina and I have picked up Tagalog as my third language (I fluently speak French and English). The main reason I joined Filipino guild is for the ability to learn and practice another language, make friends and expand my horizons.

I would love to see enabling the UI so that we can have more players coming to the game from other nationalities so we can have a larger playerbase and have the ability to appreciate other languages and cultures.

[Blue100000005]

Completely agree here, I am in A Filipino guild, 99% of my guild mates are in the Philippines (Play on Sarlona obviously). Although they can and do speak English, we normally speak and type in Tagalog. Now I am French Canadian, my wife is Filipina and I have picked up Tagalog as my third language (I fluently speak French and English). The main reason I joined Filipino guild is for the ability to learn and practice another language, make friends and expand my horizons.

I would love to see enabling the UI so that we can have more players coming to the game from other nationalities so we can have a larger playerbase and have the ability to appreciate other languages and cultures.

Dumb question, why is it obvious you play on sarlona if from the phillipines?

[~???]

I would go a step ahead, they need to correct fonts used here in the forum too, if I'm not mistaken.

I don't have a clue on how to call the OP name. The only thing I see are 3 interrogation marks "???" as his name.

I wonder if this is more embarassing for Turbine or for this user.

*sigh :(

I put my new nickname as Korean characters. It was joking but worked... and those characters are not appeared on the new forum. You can call me as "Targal"

[~EvilDragon]

Agreed. Actually, I don't think this will break community... as he said, there's always some ppl who can't use English. I think that is another problem away from this.

[~Normalerweise]

There are a lot of Unicode fonts that have the characters needed to include Asian languages. Arial MS and MS Mincho are just two that come included with Windows OS.

[~Gaeryus]

The problem is that Turbine, and probably most corporations, still follow the rule that English is the international language. This is now quite outdated, and does not correspond to reality in terms of business volume.

I predict that soon, Chinese will be the new international language. Or maybe a solution like Esperanto.

Carry on.



~ Gaeryus (Sorc18/Pal2) Firebrand ~ ~ Phlegma (13Mnk/7Rog)(L5) van Moyst ~
~ Hakashe (Pal18/Mnk2)(L2) Nurigatu ~ ~ Koergan (Cle17/Brb2/Fgt1) Flamebeard ~

Captain of the Flying Fock ~ ~ Nothing Personal (http://my.ddo.com/guild-argonnessen-nothing_personal/) ~ ~ Epic Farming Videos (http://www.youtube.com/user/Gaeryus) ~ ~ New and Exciting Bugs™ (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/390042)

[SisAmethyst]

...

This problem is not from input system, It's because of font in the game. We can type as our languages well, but typed word becomes "??????." you can see a screenshot below... I don't think putting new characters to the font doesn't cost terribly, but this would make new people who have potentials to purchase the game. at least you can have that reason to do this.
...

You mix font with character set. While the font itself may support additional characters the underlying system doesn't necessarily. Reason is that in the first ASCII character set one only had about 255 different characters, which also included some special characters like 10 & 13 for linefeed and carriage return (Lookup the windows Terminal font). This ASCII character set also included some common European characters.

To handle different countries and their different character needs additional character sets had been introduced. For example big5 (Chinese Traditional), euc-kr (Korean) while most western products usually use iso-8859-1 (Western Alphabet), iso-8859-2 (Central European Alphabet) or their equivalent in windows aka windows-1250. This character set is usually fix and you can't switch in between them nor directly translate them.

To handle transitions we now also have UTF-8 (Universal Alphabet) but it is still limited to 256 characters and may need some additional control, e.g. may need a header (BOM) to indicate UTF.

To use the full option of character sets one would need to use UTF-16, which mean that each character is not represented by 8 but 16 bit, allowing up to 64K different characters. However you can't just translate your source code in one click from ISO-8859-1 into UTF-16 as for example all functions that read and write configuration files would need to handle now two bytes for each character instead of one.

To conclude, your font (e.g. Verdana) may provide for each character code in UTF-16 a graphical description, that however doesn't mean your software support multibyte characters. Either it will strip out the higher byte, or will treat each byte as a single character, which then lead on the other end to garbage text displayed with '?' for wrong characters.

[~Bagtit_Ni_Sarlona]

Dumb question, why is it obvious you play on sarlona if from the phillipines?

Not a dumb question, ever since I satrted playing DDO i noticed that Sarlona has a very large asian population (Chinese, Korean, and Filipino from my experience) compared to other servers I played on.

It's obvious for probably me and other liked minded individuals, most likley not for the general server population because i specificaly sought out Filipino players. on all servers before settling on Sarlona I know of 2 guilds, ours on Sarlona and Far East Movement on Orien

[chfhr4004]

/signed

[Targal]

You mix font with character set. While the font itself may support additional characters the underlying system doesn't necessarily. Reason is that in the first ASCII character set one only had about 255 different characters, which also included some special characters like 10 & 13 for linefeed and carriage return (Lookup the windows Terminal font). This ASCII character set also included some common European characters.

To handle different countries and their different character needs additional character sets had been introduced. For example big5 (Chinese Traditional), euc-kr (Korean) while most western products usually use iso-8859-1 (Western Alphabet), iso-8859-2 (Central European Alphabet) or their equivalent in windows aka windows-1250. This character set is usually fix and you can't switch in between them nor directly translate them.

To handle transitions we now also have UTF-8 (Universal Alphabet) but it is still limited to 256 characters and may need some additional control, e.g. may need a header (BOM) to indicate UTF.

To use the full option of character sets one would need to use UTF-16, which mean that each character is not represented by 8 but 16 bit, allowing up to 64K different characters. However you can't just translate your source code in one click from ISO-8859-1 into UTF-16 as for example all functions that read and write configuration files would need to handle now two bytes for each character instead of one.

To conclude, your font (e.g. Verdana) may provide for each character code in UTF-16 a graphical description, that however doesn't mean your software support multibyte characters. Either it will strip out the higher byte, or will treat each byte as a single character, which then lead on the other end to garbage text displayed with '?' for wrong characters.

This is not a problem from byte system. The game uses Unicode currently showing full-character - of course, if It had fonts to show -, so you can find it out by writting them to game which can show you "????", then copying them from chat window to out-game. They just didn't contain some characters at the game. I can show you It's right if you want.

and I didn't say anything from translation. I said only chatting system.
They don't have any limit like 256 of ASCII. then why dose russian and greek shown? They're not ASCII...

or you can say It's added to ASCII. but Russian(=Greek) ASCII and English ASCII are different things.


to font, Verdana is only for showing English part, not shoing foreign characters. They just can added more characters to Verdana they using currently.

[HAL]

I imagine that those who say that they can't moderate in another language are correct. In addition, the filter will not work in another language.

I'm sure that eventually they will develop game chat to automatically translate to and from other language characters, but unfortunately I don't see it in this game unless it lasts a lot longer. Hopefully it will :)

[goodspeed]

Ladders are still kicking our ass and you have hope of a language barrier being lifted? lol sonny boy I do admire your hope.

[Targal]

I imagine that those who say that they can't moderate in another language are correct. In addition, the filter will not work in another language.

I'm sure that eventually they will develop game chat to automatically translate to and from other language characters, but unfortunately I don't see it in this game unless it lasts a lot longer. Hopefully it will :)

Well, that's true. unpleasurable words from other language will be not filtered. yes. but, I don't think you can find out that's improper words... and those who saying that words, you don't need to give them your interest. ;)
by the way, DDO is currently serviced for German and French, but I'm not sure their words can be filtered. lol

[Targal]

Ladders are still kicking our ass and you have hope of a language barrier being lifted? lol sonny boy I do admire your hope.

at least doing something like this is better than nothing. I just wanna take an answer from developers. :/

[bsquishwizzy]

I write applications that are used in multiple languages.

First, Turbine might not be able to add fonts to the chat system because it very well may be a third-party product that they purchsed licneses for, and it may have limitations.

Second, Greek and Russian characters may be supported because the font they use supports them. Notice that you can only use Veranda. Most of the fonts are Truetype fonts, and it is not really all that difficult to substitute one for another. But, the problem comes in when you start doing sizing and different screen resolutions. You start getting characters cut off at the top, bottom, or whereever.

Third, it may have something to do with the way the chat data is sent to and from a destination. My thought is that there is some sort of SOAP or XML involved, and the header on those things can be codepage-specific. Meaning that if I have an XML format that stores French / Spanish characters in text, you must apply a specific codepage value to the XML so that it can be parsed correctly (I'm not a huge XML expert when it comes to this, but I have run up against this problem in the past on a few projects).

Lastly, that chat area contains both user chat text AND messages from the servers and the game itself (not to mention the general chat area). This means that for all of this to work, you're going to have a seperate set of game text for each language, which is possible. However, if you are in a quest with other non-Korean / Japanese / Chinese speakers, your chat text will not translate, and will show up as complete garbage on the other end of the pipe.

The only real resolution to most of this is to have servers for specific regions of the globe, and anyone who wants to run on that region must have a PC configured to use the native locale information for that server region - no crossing over to other servers. I don't think that will work well with a truly global MMO. It means that Korean players cannot play with English-speakers, and people in Greece cannot play with Japanese players, and so on. And if there is not a huge population in a specific region to justify the costs of a game server, then you don't get DDO.

So there will be limitations.

This has nothing to do with what is fair.

A potential solution is for Turbine to open up a secondary chat API that allows some third-party developer to create something that can address the language problem for a specific region. So you'd end up with two in-game chat solutions: one that is a "global" chat that handles the public areas, guild chat, and party chat, and a second chat that can be purchased as an add-on (or downloaded freeware piece) so that Koreans can chat easily with other Koreans, Afghanis with other Afghanis, and people who understand ancient Cuniform writing other other people who understand ancient Cuniform writing (I hope I spelled that correctly). Much in the same way people use Ventrillo for voice chat, except integrated with the game.

But having them do this in-game would be a frickin' nightmare for the reasons I described above. It is NOT as easy as adding a font to a selection menu. There are other considerations.

[Therigar]

I understand the original post and empathize with the original poster. However, I disagree with them.

A game that is, by design, international in scope will attract players who are international in scope. Those players will group together and those players must be able to communicate with one another.

In such situations it is entirely reasonable to select a dominant language and to enforce its use for all communications. In fact, it can be considered very rude to communicate in a language other than the default as this intentionally excludes portions of the gaming populace.

Now, I understand that Turbine has portions of the forums open to non-English language posts. I will not speculate on the rationale for this. It could be a market driven decision. It could be a language fluency decision. It could be a misguided romanticism with a particular language or culture. Regardless of the cause the existence of these non-English forum areas do not automatically constitute a precedent regarding the inclusion of other languages.

Similarly, the font decisions internal to the game do not automatically constitute a precedent or support for non-English communication via in-game chat. To the contrary, this is just a by-product of the font selection which is made on the basis of readability and aesthetics rather than on the alphabet sets that are supported.

DDO happens to be a game developed in a predominantly English speaking nation for a predominantly English speaking audience. Unless there is a business case to be made for inclusion of additional chat fonts/alphabets there seems little reason to support the original poster's request.

That may seem insensitive or undiplomatic. However, the bottom line driving Turbine should be whether it is a financially responsible and lucrative investment. This is what enables DDO to continue and what will determine its future.