plaguelands.comEverQuest II Lost in Translation
According to the fine reporting pacific epoch on March 30th Everquest II hit rock-bottom and ceased operations in China. Not only in China, but the off-switch was also flipped shutting down the Korean and Taiwan servers. Not everything was a total apocalypse as players on the defunct servers were given the option to merge and descend onto the North American servers. Cue the duh, duh, duh music.
This news release reads as a eulogy confirming a death knell for EverQuest II in The Orient. Were the concurrent numbers in beta so atrocious that SOE decided to eschew Everquest II from a marketplace abundantly fertile with potential money hats? Was the competition from World of Warcraft too astounding for Gamania to not finish all three translations? Did General Mao veto EverQuest II because of his fierce World of Warcraft addiction and Coke payout.
Three different complex translations needed for a game as massive as EverQuest II must have been an enormous undertaking. I would say the result of this cluster fuck is the fault of Gamania, perhaps they would be better off sticking with what they do best and developing overrated models (SOGA) and not full-bore localization development.
Although SOE had announced the news of the merger earlier in the month it still brought confusion for some players who missed the memo and when the servers came back online from the last patch downtime three servers were met with well, what I would assume were probably brilliant minions sent from the in-game clandestine programmer’s dungeon to redeem their revenge on the players, because we all know programmers are enamored with players whom break their superior code.
Let me start with a Pre-Face.
EQ2 East is a seperate entity run by Gamania, the people who brought us the SOGA Models. Recently I had heard news that it had not been doing well and was scheduled to be shut down.
Fast Forward to March 30th, 2006. Unrest, Mistmoore and Najena servers go down during regular down time but are not brought up for over 7 more hours.
No announcement is made as to why these servers are suffering extended downtime, not a single word from SOE regarding the issue, Many people just assumed some hardware or software fixes were going in.
The truth:
On March 30th, SOE Merged 3 EQ2 East Asian Servers into Najena, Mistmoore and Unrest without telling anyone on the affected servers. Many of you have been wondering about all the wierd names and people with ??? as last names showing up all of a sudden after the down time, and of the many new characters that have appeared since that date.
I have Been told.
Chinese Servers were merged with Mistmoore
Taiwan Servers were merged with Najena
Korean Servers were merged with Unrest.My Question to SOE, why was such a significant event not brought to the attention of the players on those servers, and why did soe try to hide the fact that it occured at all. Why did SOE not inform it’s customers of the long downtime and the reason for it.
This is an absolute disaster in Customer Service to try and sneak something such as this by them and hope they don’t find out, SOE should be ashamed of itself for attempting this without informing their affected customers.
Let me close by saying this, I welcome our Asian friends with open arms and no ill will, I look forward to working together with them and forming an even stronger community, Had this issue been brought forth by SOE then no complaint would have been raised.
In the end, I just wish SOE had communicated this issue with the customers instead of trying to sneak it by us and hoping we didn’t find out .
Hoping the players wouldn’t find out, waaaaaaaaaaah! SOE didn’t notify me via cell phone that those players would be merging onto my servers! Waaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Blackguard, EverQuest II Community Manager
I’ll start off by apologizing for not calling this out explicitly to US customers. The moves were intended to be completely seamless and would primarily impact the Asian customers who transferred over.
So, first up, who transferred over? Any of our Asian customers who are dedicated to EverQuest II and interested in playing on an English-language server. Will this disrupt your server’s economy? No. For characters or guilds that did have more coin than was determined to be within the average range for the destination server’s economy, they were capped out, which didn’t occur to more than a small handful of characters.
Why did we do it? Because we wanted to provide an opportunity for those customers who wanted to continue playing EverQuest II to do so. This also has the positive side-effect of bolstering the off-peak population on a few of our servers
Was this intended to slip by unnoticed? Not at all. I’ll take the blame for dropping the ball on the information front; I honestly thought this transfer was still a ways off, and it was my bad for reading the wrong date on the transfer. This was announced to the customers we thought it would really impact (i.e. those who had to transfer to a new server) some time ago, and it should have been communicated at the very least to the destination servers as well.
The new players will be held to the same standard as existing players. If they break the rules of conduct, they will be banned. I’m not going to comment on the racist remarks from those in this thread, which I will immediately and permanently ban for if I see any more of them.
The boxes and other strange characters you are seeing will be going away. At the moment, they are still able to use characters not in the English alphabet in a few places, and that is a bug that will be smashed as soon as possible. Again, I apologize for dropping the ball on communicating the downtime and transfers, but you should really not notice much of a difference overall in your play experience
Blackguard does a great job of playing the piñata, a special community manager only class. In conclusion, I have some public consultant advice for John Smedley, cheer up you loopy bastard, you and your bureaucratic cronies at SOE can always try tapping The Orient again with EverQuest III, for now there is always karaoke and dance.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “EverQuest II Lost in Translation,” an entry on Plaguelands
- Published:
- 04.07.06 / 3pm
- Category:
- China, Everquest 2, Korea, Locilization, SOE, Taiwan
EQ2 cannot be properly localized because SOE fucked up. The fault is entirely SOE’s for developing a game that not only makes localizations difficult to implement but also makes it nearly impossible to maintain the localization properly.
The German version of EQ2 was released 18 months ago and the current state of the localization is worse than it was shortly after release. The European non-English versions of the game are directly maintained by SOE. If SOE can’t even get a German localization right 18 months after release (it should have been released with a 100% complete localization to begin with), what do you think are the odds of Gamania managing to successfully localize the turd in two Asian languages?
Patches overwrite already done translations and the translators have to backtrack and do it all over again. There seems to be no system for tracking the changes. Every time a developer fixes a typo in the English text, the translation of that text gets patched out and is replaced with the English one.
Language data is not kept in a few centralized places, it’s spread all over the place, e.g. the phrases for the “con” messages are physically located in a different file or database or whatever than the text of the faction messages. Spell descriptions are located in a different place than the spell stats and so on.
The result is completely messed up tool-tips, which are partially English and partially translated. Example:
http://www.olnigg.de/jahr2005/image/olg11923.jpg
Every time the game is updated, the quality of the localization degrades noticably. Translators are busy just fixing the translations that have been messed up by the patch. I know for a fact that SOE had no less than 6 translators working full-time on the German localization at one time and they weren’t even able to keep up with fixing the stuff that kept getting broken on each game update, much less implementing the missing translations (EQ2 shipped with about 20% of the German localization done). The problems have been accumulating over time and as of today, the localization is even more fucked up than it was 18 months ago.
EQ2 seems to lack the flexibility to properly accomodate languages with a different sentence structure than English and apparently has no mechanism whatsoever for dealing with languages that have a higher degree of inflection than English.
That’s a huge problem when it comes to dynamic text like combat messages, as words are shifting through inflections depending on the grammatical context. EQ2 was never designed to deal with that and SOE has given up trying:
http://www.olnigg.de/jahr2005/image/olg11923.jpg
There is no way for translators to ensure consistency. For example, quest text appears to be stored in plain text. Mob names, item names, location names etc. in quests texts are are not hooked to the database entries of the corresponding objects, they have to be translated “manually”. That means that sometimes a mob or an item in a quest description has a different name than it has in the game world.
That’s a pretty clear indication that the tools for maintaining the localization are woefully inadequate. Localizations of such a large scope have to be supported by professional tools that not only make all language specific data directly accessible, aid translators in maintaining consistency and tracking changes but also provide a proper workflow. EQ2 appears to have nothing of that sort.
Making a MMORPG that supports various localizations is a huge task because you cannot just translate it once and be done with it. You need to build the game from the ground up to support different languages. Everything language-related has to been highly configurable, accessible and flexible.
For example, German has a crapload of noun and verb inflections. The sentence structure is freakish to begin with and it can change with tenses. You can probably eliminate some of the problems by avoiding certain sentence constructs but you still need to have the ability to store several inflected variants of a word, which can then be properly hooked into a dynamic message (like “AAA stabs BBB for XXX zzz damage”).
Now, I don’t know the first thing about East Asian languages but judging from the problems with the German localization of EQ2 it is obvious that the problem is EQ2 itself and SOE’s amateurishness with localizations. You can have the best translators in the world but they can do diddly when the game doesn’t even properly support non-English languages on the most basic level and when there are no proper tools for the localization process.
It seems clear to me that SOE made EQ2 inherently unlocalizable and I am sure that the Chinamen are not to blame.
Sorry, the 2nd link is wrong. Here’s the right one:
http://www.olnigg.de/jahr2005/image/olg11908.jpg
Good post, did you know someone working on the German localization?
No, not personally. The information that 6 translators work on the German localization and that patches overwrite translations is official though, it was posted on the offical German forums.
The rest can be easily infered by looking at what works and what not. EQ2’s lack of support for verb and noun inflections is evident: combat and other dynamic messages are either (partially) English or gramtically borked. Crafted item names are another problematic area, since item names are usually dynamically compounded by a noun plus one or more adjectives describing the quality of the item. The adjective has to be inflected in accordance to the gender of the noun and that doesn’t happen in EQ2.
It’s also obvious that translators have difficulties accessing some of the language data, e.g. some mob names have been broken since beta and the translators don’t seem to be able to fix them. It is very likely that translators have no direct access to the language data at all. I suspect that they translate, send it to some developer who then makes the modifications. This is speculation on my part but it would explain a lot.
Having 6 people working on a localization for more than 18 months and making virtually no progress is a dead giveaway that the game doesn’t properly support localizations on a technical level.
You probably cannot imagine sorry state of the localization. It’s actually quite amusing. At one point they stopped localizing the NPC voice-overs so now we have NPCs that will speak a sentence in German and then switch to a different voice and continue in English. It’s like talking to someone with a split personality.
World of Warcraft on the other hand has been localized flawlessly and was released with a working and complete translation. The German and French patches are released simultaneously with the English version, which is quite impressive because it means that the patches are being translated while they’re still in developement. WoW proves that MMORPGs can be successfully localized.
Vanguard is probably yet another localization desaster in the making. The developers seem to be blissfully ignorant towards the requirements of making a MMORPG localizable. They’ve stated on the official forums that the localization will be handled by Microsoft. I’m kinda getting the vibe that Sigil is unaware that they have to develope the game with localizations in mind. None of the devs have been involved in the developement of a MMORPG that has been successfully localized so they probably don’t even have the know-how.
You do know that when they do localization, they translate voice too. Not to mention, there’s a SHIT LOAD of text that needs to be translated and tons of other stuff that needs to be reworded so it’s not offensive. The game is fucking huge, not some empty world like WoW where the end game is just a few raids. EQ2 has entire books like Oblivion does, it’s a game full of background and lore. So please, before you go around saying things like “Hey SOE is shit because they made a game so big they can’t translate it all.” try to use the grey matter in your head to say “Well….it’s a huge game and there’s probably a lot of text to go through.”
Oh and Vanguard isn’t being made by SOE, so blame it on Sigil..
And one final comment, everyone speaks english. Having a few works or phrases in english doesn’t make the translation borked.