Automatic James wrote:
It is obvious that this rule is used primarily to allow thinly veiled or outright racist/ethnocentric behavior to occur.
So now we have to be of one race to speak a language? You do realize that there are two white majority countries (Spain and Portugal) that speak Spanish and Portuguese.
For example, two Spanish-speaking players are having a conversation in town square, and an English-speaking player is nearby who feels threatened and offended because they are unable to understand the conversation (which is none of their business anyway). The English-speaking player calls a GM (actually I've seen Katze sit in town and behave like this himself) and the GM enforces this bigotry by attempting to threaten the Spanish-speaking players into speaking English, and then banning them if they refuse.
GMs are the long arms of the law, they must enforce it. They have nothing against them, they are just doing their job. And btw, Katze is a native German speaker, a girl, and lives in Germany.
The rationalization most often provided for this rule and this behavior is that without multilingual GMs the game would be horrible chaos because the thought police would be unable to moderate every single conversation and someone might be offended.
The GM's job is to enforce the rules, they must keep The Mana World a safe place, and they must uphold the safety of the players.
First, multilingual GMs are only a problem because the current ruling clique of TMW has no desire to "give some idiot from South America GM powers,"
When did we ever say that? I want verbatim evidence. And FYI, the 3 GMs are not native speakers of English. Vink speaks Danish, Katze speaks German, and Platyna speaks Polish.
another clearly ethnocentric point of view.
If we were ethnocentric, we wouldn't just crack down on language. Why would we be letting them play at all? Strike three.
Next, there is the issue of over-policing in TMW period.
3 GMs police 300 players, yes we are over-policing big time.
Just as they assume anyone not speaking English is dumb and disrespectful, this group of players assumes that anyone who does not care for them personally or has a different playstyle is a bot.
When did we ever say this? The majority of the developers don't speak English as their first language, and one barely speaks it at all. And how would you recommend we search for bots? Should we write some kind of super mind reading program? If you wish to write the program, go ahead. Otherwise, don't comment on our only way of finding bots. Would you prefer that all of the good training areas be overrun by bots and your hours of trying to level extended to days, if not weeks? Not everyone who doesn't speak English is "dumb and disrespectful", we never said this, and certainly never implied it. We just asked politely to speak only English in the public chat so that GMs could moderate.
This whole witch hunt police state atmosphere is entirely inappropriate for a pre-alpha MMO, which should be focused more on developing an enjoyable and bug-free game--something that an larger and happier playerbase contributes to.
Keeping The Mana World LEGAL doesn't suit you as "appropriate"? If people come in, speak a language the GMs don't understand, offer people warez, they take it, and the police shut The Mana World down for illegal activity. Does that suit your "enjoyable" game?
So, unless this project is able to distance itself from the clique of paranoid elitists who are currently dominant, TMW is doomed to be a project serving these people and these people alone.
It's called a targeted demographic, T.V. shows have them, and all Video Games have them. Ever seen game ratings? That's what they are for. If you have a problem with our "elitist" attitude, I recommend you fork the project into your language, and have a player base larger than 10 people, for it to become substantially relevant.
"Who are these people and what is this clique?"
"What if the Spanish speakers were cussing at the poor victimized Westerner?"
and other such responses will be ignored.
Spanish is a western language. Wow, how about reading Wikipedia for once? And if we are ignoring responses, why are we posting in this topic at all?
You are attacking people, flaming the developers, and digging your case into the ground. No one will listen to you if you are impolite and highly accusatory in your debates. Also, using the race card only used when you are at a dead end in your arguments, and have no other points. You are simply reusing arguments that have been proved to be wrong time and time again. You need not be a certain race to speak a language, Spanish and Portuguese are also spoken as an official language in predominantly white countries, and most of the developers do not even speak English as their first language. So stick
that in your pipe and smoke it.