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.

Here's a heads up for all our Russian speaking readers: Starting on August 6th, WoW Europe will begin selling the fully localized Russian version of World of Warcraft and Burning Crusade, complete with a Russian-speaking support team.

The game will be sold in DVD and CD versions and will include 1 month and 14 days of free play time respectively. There will also be a special Russian pricing plan starting at 399 rubles per a month for a 1-month subscription.

In addition, current European account holders will have the option of playing on the new Russian servers after downloading the localization pack. There will also be free transfers to the Russian servers for a limited time, and the opportunity to convert a European account to a Russian account.

For more information, you can check out the official Russian site.

Blizzard is once again expanding its World of Warcraft player base. July 25^th will mark the launch of Latin American Servers for Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. The expansion will be supported and sold in other countries in the future. New players can also purchase the Burning Crusade and 60 day prepaid game cards. A free trial is available at juegawarcraft.com.

The launch will be accompanied by celebratory events with Blizzard staff:

July 25
Blockbuster Pilares
Av. Universidad #697
Del Valle,

July 26-27
Plaza Satelite
Estado de Mexico,

The good people at Wowhead, WoW database extraordinaire, have just warned me that the French, the Spanish, and the Germans are invading! OK, not really. Actually, the site is set to go live with localizations in those three languages, which will appear in the next 24 hours. You will then be able to read descriptions of quests, spells, and items, and everything else on that marvelous site, in any of those languages (plus of course English).

Each language will have its own comment thread on each page, although the forums will remain English-only. I imagine this will come as welcome news to the many WoW players out there who do not have English as a first language; even on the North American realms, there seem to be a fair amount of French speakers. Hooray for multilingualism!

It seems to come up quite often. Someone wants the language barrier bought down. Even if it requires questing or skilling up, they want to be able to talk to the other faction. It would even make lore sense, since at the least, Undead and Blood Elves should probably know common, and Thalassian is probably close enough to Darnassian that someone who knows one language should probably be able to get the gist of the other. That said, Blizzard's held pretty fast to the principle of squelching cross-factional communication. The only way you can make yourself known to the other side is with the default emotes, or sometimes with a bit of creative typing that can only convey crude messages.

Honestly, at one point I was pretty gung-ho on removing the language barrier. As an RPer, a big part of the fun for me is being able to talk, act out scenes, say stuff in character, and all that. It was sort of annoying sometimes that I could be in an epic struggle with, say, a guild of Undead assassins, but any actual communication we made, be it OOC arranging of the storyline and in-game events or IC trash talk, would have to all be on message boards and email. It loses some of the spontaneity of in-game interaction. That said, lately I think I've decided that I'm fine with the current of level of cross-faction communication. Talking to the other side would cause more trouble than it would be worth.

WoW is a game of many languages, and I'm not talking about Common and Taurahe. You can play the game in English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Korean, and probably some more I'm not even aware of (Japanese?). And in 2008, Russian is going to join that list of official WoW localizations, with a dedicated Russian team in Blizzard Europe's France and Ireland offices. Mike Morhaime, Blizz's president, had this to say: "Considering the scale and enthusiasm of the Russian community, we recognized that offering a dedicated Russian-language version of World of Warcraft was the next important step for the game in Europe." I don't play on the European realms, so I'll just have to take his word for it, I suppose. That and get used to seeing Cyrillic screenshots from time to time.

As I've said before, we have a rule in our guild prohibiting leet speak and excessive abbreviation in guild chat. That being said, I've thought a lot about the use of abbreviations in WoW and how they are affecting the language.

This might come from my days as an English teacher, but I think of the language as a fluid, breathing thing. The formality that people used when speaking 100 years ago doesn't exist now, and I doubt we would ever hear in game "pardon me, good sir, could you wait a moment?" instead of "one sec AFK" unless we were on an RP server or feeling particularly silly.

I found myself in a rather interesting pickup group for Steamvaults this weekend. I found a hunter through the LFG system, and he invited a warrior, a priest, and a warlock who were his guildies. I breathed a sigh of relief -- an easy run to the Karazhan key fragment was assured. Until I noticed that I could only understand one out of every five words they said. The guild I had grouped with was largely French-speaking, and my high school French IV lessons weren't going to get me out of this one.

I explained that I didn't speak French well enough to communicate with them on Vent, and in return, they set up a macro system so that I could be informed of my role while they did the actual strategizing. Anything with an X over its head would be sapped by me, and they spoke English well enough to type out simple directions for a rogue ("left!" "resap!" "wait!") The first couple of pulls were rough, but it went smoothly after the first boss. In fact, it went better than most English-speaking groups, possibly because there wasn't annoying chatter or loot arguments.

There are many Quebecois in my guild and on my server, and from that, much of Magtheridon seems to have gained some command of French, or at least some horrible hybrid of French, English and WoWspeak. ("Vous, uh, feignez le mort?") Does your server have a lot of diversity when it comes to languages, or does everyone mostly speak one? How do you deal with multilingual guilds or instance groups?