Oh My God – I HATE Playing With……[INSERT NATIONALITY HERE]
Wait, wait, wait just a minute there fella. This is a Pyrion Flax lecture. I don’t want to hear your point of view. This is not a discussion, this is a wake-up call for all you ignoramuses out there with your stupid e-pinion about them foreigners coming over here and ruining your game of Dota.
“BUT PFLAX”, you whine in a shrill, high-pitched falsetto that instantly belittles both you and your argument, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. I PLAY WITH NATIONALITY-X ALL THE TIME AND THEY ARE TERRIBLE!!!!!!!”
First of all, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Secondly, stop talking in all-caps, it’s considered rude on the internet for some dumb reason. Thirdly, allow me to break down for you why you’re a wrongful idiot.
These People are Ruining My Game Because they Don’t Speak my Language:
Chances are the group of people in question come from a very large country. Brazil and Russia seem to be the ones most widely accused of producing baddies. But here’s the thing – if you play on, say, a US East server, the main nationality you’re likely to bump into other than ‘Murricans, is Brazilians. I queue on three different servers when I’m looking for a game, and I’m sure they do too.
Brazil is a bloody huge country. And they speak their language of choice which is Portuguese. Know why? Because THAT’S what bloody huge countries do. Ask any American what language they speak and they speak English (like all good-hearted folks) but they wouldn’t speak English if they didn’t have 300 million people around them also speaking it. They’d speak a whole bunch of languages.
Ask Switzerland. It’s a small country sandwiched between a bunch of bigger ones. I know people from Switzerland and they all speak, like, fifteen languages, including Dothraki. But Brazil is fucking massive. They’re a magnet for other people, and when people go to Brazil they are expected to speak Portuguese, or be able to wave and point and shout “beer beer beer” a lot. People come to THEM. They don’t go to you. Ever met a bunch of Brazilians on holiday? Me neither!! They can go on holiday any time….IN BRAZIL. It’s awesome. The point is, large populations of people tend towards having less need to speak other languages. You’re going to have to deal with this concept. My favourite part of this is the incredible amount of irony in American and English people screeching about how Brazilians talk funny and only speak one language.
Dude….seriously….look at yourself.
But they have their OWN Servers, why don’t they STAY there?!
I play on European servers and some of those are in Luxembourg. I don’t speak any German or French or Luxembourgish. It would, under your rules, be perfectly reasonable for people from those countries to ask me to stick to my own kind and play ONLY with people who share a language with me.
That’s kind of uncool, you know what I mean man? Because the internet is meant to be about, like, breaking down barriers and stuff. Now I don’t speak those languages, but the rules of the game are the same. We all play Dota 2 and it’s universal. Valve have even given us the chat-wheel, you can ping stuff, and everybody knows the word “noob” and “scrub” and “gg ff”. So how about you learn some Russian swearwords, cyka.
But I’ve Played with HUNDREDS of People and WITHOUT DOUBT the Worst have been from COUNTRY-X:
Time for a simple statistical mathematical scientifical break-down. I don’t care if this isn’t accurate or if the numbers don’t add up. The first point is, I cannot add and the second point is, I don’t care and my fourth point is, fuck you and listen. Imagine that the population of a given game could be represented by a bowl of snacks. Yeah, SNACKS. This is serious.
The quantity of each different snack in the bowl is related to the population of the country it represents, and half of all the snacks in the bowl will be bad. So for instance – if 15% of the people playing Dota 2 at any one time are from Brazil, we’ll represent them with a Brazil nut. So 15% of the snacks in the bowl are Brazil Nuts. But since 50% of all the snacks are bad, that means half the Brazil nuts will not be very good, in fact they’ll be bad and taste terrible. This represents the sizeable number of people who are casual players, who don’t really try that hard and probably couldn’t even if they wanted to. They’re scrubs. They’ll buy the wrong item, ignore their teammates and just play for themselves. You’ll find these people in EVERY game in the history of games, going back to whatever they did for fun in Ancient Greece. Marbles or something. Most marbles players STANK. The thing is, if you dip your hand into the snack bowl and grab a snack, there’s a 15% chance you’ll get a Brazil Nut. And a 50% chance it’ll be bad. And since there are 4 other players on your team, that means you’ve got four chances of getting a bad Brazil nut. So fully 7.5% of the entire snack population of Planet Snackbowl are bad Brazilian players. But hey, 50% of the players from Lichtenstein are terrible too. But since there are so few people FROM Lichtenstein you’re unlikely to grab the one teeny tiny snack in the bowl that represents that country, AND that player will probably speak English so where they’re from will never come up. You’ll just write him or her off as being a bad player and move on.
Why is this relevant? Why are you talking about snacks and making me hungry? Because a hungry mind is a keen mind. Just ask a fat dude. He knows EXACTLY how far it is to the nearest vending machine at all times. They’re switched on, those guys, they really are.
But do you get my point? Do you? Huh? If there are more OF a thing then you’re more likely to SEE that thing and notice it, especially if it has a noticeable characteristic such as calling you “cyka” or going “huehuehue”. And even if the distribution of good to bad is the same amongst ALL the peoples of the World, you’re going to bump into a lot more of those bad people from the larger countries and then your simple insect-brain is going to say “hey Brazilians are bad because I met a bunch of bad Brazilians”. But you’re wrong. What you meant to say was “Most players are bad, and holy shit a lot of people that come from Brazil play Dota 2, when they could be at the beach watching mad amounts of ass bouncing around in bikinis”.
And guess where Dota is most popular – Brazil, Russia, China and the USA. Now I play on US East, EU West and EU East servers, so I can’t speak from experience when it comes to Chinese players. But I can say with a lot of certainty that there will be the same distribution of bad and good players among their population as there is in all the other countries of the World.
How? How can I state this with certainty? Because that’s how human beings work. We have good players and bad players all over the place. The reason some stand out more is because there are more of them. It’s just simple mathematics people.
So for the love of Gabe can we PLEASE try to get along and stop all this stupid cloaked xenophobia? Because it plays into the hands of certain groups of people I like to call “Shitlords”, and Shitlords want us all to hate each other and assume we’re better than everyone and close our eyes and get boners about our own nationality because that way it’s easier to fuck everybody over. You’re doing it every time you lose a game and say “we lost….because of Russians”.
No. You lost because you collectively stank up the place. Stop being a knob.
I've been "saved" by thes stereotypical prejudices against russians/brazilians by some players from a middle-sized european country: Some months ago I was getting matched with some stacks from players from this country in short succession; they refused communication in english and only spoke their local language I did not understand for most of the game, but then blamed me for losing the game in all-chat in english. Luckily I know quite some people from this country in real life and this sets things into the right perspective, but I still shake a little bit whenever I see somebody typing their language in dota.
Of course, everything you say in the op is true. Welcome to tl.
I don't care how good or bad they are it is immensely frustrating when someone on your team can't understand what you are saying and you have no idea what they are saying and what is even worse is when I solo que into a party of 3 or more BR's screaming in Portuguese over voice chat. I can either mute them and cut off any possible communication with my team or suffer them yelling Portuguese obscenities.
On October 19 2013 03:42 Talin wrote: Here I thought there were only two countries - Korea and Foreignland.
Korea and *Future West Korea*
Also, don't forget that bad players are rarely bad all the time. Usually a bad player in your game is around the same average skill as you, but is just having a bad game comparatively to you. This will really skew the statistics for the confirmation bias, as during a bad game you tend to ignore criticism more since you aren't paying as much attention in the first place.
Well said, I really think this is one of those things people get all angry over when the reality is far from the rage-inducing aspect people take it as.
On October 19 2013 03:50 Snorkle wrote: I don't care how good or bad they are it is immensely frustrating when someone on your team can't understand what you are saying and you have no idea what they are saying and what is even worse is when I solo que into a party of 3 or more BR's screaming in Portuguese over voice chat. I can either mute them and cut off any possible communication with my team or suffer them yelling Portuguese obscenities.
On October 19 2013 03:50 Snorkle wrote: I don't care how good or bad they are it is immensely frustrating when someone on your team can't understand what you are saying and you have no idea what they are saying and what is even worse is when I solo que into a party of 3 or more BR's screaming in Portuguese over voice chat. I can either mute them and cut off any possible communication with my team or suffer them yelling Portuguese obscenities.
But those guys are just dicks. The point I'm making is that them being Brazilian is neither here nor there. It's not excusing dickish behaviour, it's just pointing out a few things. If someone acts like a dick, it doesn't matter where they are from - they're just a straight up DICK. (ps, I am a huge dick)
On October 19 2013 03:50 Snorkle wrote: I don't care how good or bad they are it is immensely frustrating when someone on your team can't understand what you are saying and you have no idea what they are saying and what is even worse is when I solo que into a party of 3 or more BR's screaming in Portuguese over voice chat. I can either mute them and cut off any possible communication with my team or suffer them yelling Portuguese obscenities.
But those guys are just dicks. The point I'm making is that them being Brazilian is neither here nor there. It's not excusing dickish behaviour, it's just pointing out a few things. If someone acts like a dick, it doesn't matter where they are from - they're just a straight up DICK. (ps, I am a huge dick)
The frustrating thing about that behaviour is not that they're shouting but that neither party can understand the other.
First of all dota's not most popular in USA at all. For example, US has only 1% more players than Ukraine alone, which is an infinitely smaller country. If you scale that down in terms of popularity, dota's a lot more popular in many countries in Europe than the US. Probably even than in Brazil. Second, if you think a russian/brazilian nut has only a 50% chance of being bad, maybe you're considering solo mid 0-7 into 35 min naked radiance bloodseeker legit. Out of my ~2500 games (and many others') it's more like 90% chance to be bad. And that's a number that not even their massive player base can't excuse. Even if you manage to convince anyone with this post, a very likely scenario is: "oh, PFlax is right, i've been such a douche all this time => proceeds to queue on EU server => runs into the above-mentioned bloodseeker => gg"
On October 19 2013 03:50 Snorkle wrote: I don't care how good or bad they are it is immensely frustrating when someone on your team can't understand what you are saying and you have no idea what they are saying and what is even worse is when I solo que into a party of 3 or more BR's screaming in Portuguese over voice chat. I can either mute them and cut off any possible communication with my team or suffer them yelling Portuguese obscenities.
But those guys are just dicks. The point I'm making is that them being Brazilian is neither here nor there. It's not excusing dickish behaviour, it's just pointing out a few things. If someone acts like a dick, it doesn't matter where they are from - they're just a straight up DICK. (ps, I am a huge dick)
The frustrating thing about that behaviour is not that they're shouting but that neither party can understand the other.
I've made some pretty good doto friends through shouting matches (Where we all speak the same language). Have yet to make a doto friend who speaks a different language yet...
Russian or not, I consider it an act of respect to at least try to communicate with your team with what is supposed to be the international language. Last time I checked, english was taught in most non ex USSR countries at school, and russian was not. I'm not a native english speaker and my english isn't good, still it seems natural to me to speak english on the internet when I'm not sure I'm only with people that speak French. You can't compare France to Russia in size, but still, nobody learns Russian in europe except in the eastern countries, while I guess Russians get english classes. So I'd expect people to try and speak basic english in online games.
But yeah, generalizing sucks, Russia is far from having the asshole monopoly, and people that seriously point at russians as being a problem are dumbasses. The only thing that really annoys me is playing with people who don't seem to even try to communicate with you, and keep shouting cyrillic stuff in their microphone. 'Cause I also played with russians that spoke english (not even wrote, spoke), played great and were awesome. So at least writing a bit shouldn't be too much to ask.
I've played about 1500 games of dota 2 and not a single time have I ever been screamed at in french, german, turkish, italian or english. English is the most spoken language on EU west and still russian rage moments are far more common. Any half way intelligent person knows this isn't because of these people being russian. It's individuals acting extremely badly and without respect for their fellow players. Well you don't treat these individuals with respect. You scorn and ostricize them until they've learned to play nice. Or you tell them to get the fuck out and go back to their own playground.
My bottom line is: We shouldn't be judgemental against russians for what the worst specimens of their society get up to. But we shouldn't accept this behaviour either. I think it's fine to show clearly that you don't aproove of bad behaviour including trolling, raging and spamming.
I think most people go out of their minds with anger because there are currently a russian server and an eastern european server. These are servers where russian is the predominately spoken language. If you have any respect for the swedes or the germans or the french or whatever you will not come into a game on EU west and YELL in russian. Don't invade other people's territories for your own amusement. If you don't know the standard language spoken on that server, stay quiet and try to communicate in other ways. Don't yell in the in game microphone.
For the record, I've enjoyed playing with well behaved and skilled russians many times (probably many more than I know of because they don't speak up). There is a lot of positives coming out of russian dota. Even in pub games!
All other considerations aside, having people on your team who don't speak the same language is a major hindrance. The calculation should really be 50% of people are bad and now tack on an extra ~25% for problems caused not by necessarily being bad but because you can't communicate. Furthermore, if you're one of these Russians/Brazilians and you're surrounded mostly by people speaking another language, nobody can tell you how to improve so that just increases your chances of remaining awful forever.
My real question is why does this happen? Why are there Russians on the NA East server? Is the Brazilian server empty (assuming there is one)?
Is this blog supposed to change my mind about people from Russian and Brazil?
On October 19 2013 03:50 Snorkle wrote: I don't care how good or bad they are it is immensely frustrating when someone on your team can't understand what you are saying and you have no idea what they are saying and what is even worse is when I solo que into a party of 3 or more BR's screaming in Portuguese over voice chat. I can either mute them and cut off any possible communication with my team or suffer them yelling Portuguese obscenities.
Exactly... This is it... This is why this blog changes nothing.
This post completely misses the point that Brazilians are in my games when I don't have Spanish or Portuguese languages set on. Even if they can speak English, a majority of what they speak is their language.
We're not xenophobic, we just want to play with english speakers
Language barrier is probably the biggest deterrent for me from doing any solo que. Well over 35% of the time I get placed in with more than 2 non-English speakers, all of whom seem to keep their mics 1 mm from their mouths. I almost miss cs 1.6 servers.
On October 19 2013 04:42 FrickenHamster wrote: This post completely misses the point that Brazilians are in my games when I don't have Spanish or Portuguese languages set on. Even if they can speak English, a majority of what they speak is their language.
We're not xenophobic, we just want to play with english speakers
"I like other races and peoples who may or may not speak other languages, but not when I'm actually confronted with them in an international game on the internet. I wish they would stick to their own kind."
Yeah you can't really go saying that everyone who complains about teammates queuing for a server whose language they don't speak as being "Xenophobic" when no one is concerned about the actual nationality. It's the language that causes problems, and no amount of self-righteous derogatory blog posts is going to make me happily accept when our team is built to hinge on one guy's success and the most he can say is gurgles, whistles, and unreadable text.
On October 19 2013 04:34 Zealos wrote: What about language filters?
What about language filters? They're a helpful, innovative solution to prevent language incompatibilities with ignorant, bigoted English speakers. Right?
On October 19 2013 04:46 itsjustatank wrote: "I like other races and peoples who may or may not speak other languages, but not when I'm actually confronted with them in an international game on the internet. I wish they would stick to their own kind."
Strawman harder, when someone is being racist because they don't want to be around other groups, that's their own psyche. Anything uncomfortable or problematic with having to be around "colored" people is an entirely emotional response from the bigot.
When someone throws a game because they can't speak or be spoken to, that inconveniences all parties involved in an objective, measurable way.
You can go ahead and justify your latent racism, in your own way. Your argument relies on the premise that all people who are non-English speakers will necessarily be people who "throw" games.
On October 19 2013 04:57 itsjustatank wrote: You can go ahead and justify your latent racism, in your own way. Your argument relies on the premise that all people who are non-English speakers will necessarily be people who "throw" games.
No one's being racist. If a blond haired, blue-eyed man of hearty English stock died splitpushing when we were all telling him that the enemy team is coming because he only speaks with gurgled moans and pings, we'd be addressing it just as often. Granted, we'd not have a term for it, but writing off everyone who has games disrupted because 40% of the team can't be communicated with as "racist" is demonizing a legitimate problem. A problem, mind you, that the players were told was in their ability to control, via filters, and we all know what good those did.
On October 19 2013 04:57 itsjustatank wrote: You can go ahead and justify your latent racism, in your own way. Your argument relies on the premise that all people who are non-English speakers will necessarily be people who "throw" games.
No one's being racist. If a blond haired, blue-eyed man of hearty English stock died splitpushing when we were all telling him that the enemy team is coming because he only speaks with gurgled moans and pings, we'd be addressing it just as often. Granted, we'd not have a term for it, but writing off everyone who has games disrupted because 40% of the team can't be communicated with as "racist" is demonizing a legitimate problem. A problem, mind you, that the players were told was in their ability to control, via filters, and we all know what good those did.
And this justifies the speech isolated in the OP as problematic? We are now back to the OP and my interpretation of a post in this thread, which on-point answers your bigoted response.
Gameplay issues can be dealt with in their own way through matchmaking and ranking.
On October 19 2013 04:57 itsjustatank wrote: You can go ahead and justify your latent racism, in your own way. Your argument relies on the premise that all people who are non-English speakers will necessarily be people who "throw" games.
No one's being racist. If a blond haired, blue-eyed man of hearty English stock died splitpushing when we were all telling him that the enemy team is coming because he only speaks with gurgled moans and pings, we'd be addressing it just as often. Granted, we'd not have a term for it, but writing off everyone who has games disrupted because 40% of the team can't be communicated with as "racist" is demonizing a legitimate problem. A problem, mind you, that the players were told was in their ability to control, via filters, and we all know what good those did.
And this justifies the speech isolated in the OP as problematic? We are now back to the OP and my interpretation of a post in this thread, which on-point answers your bigoted response.
Gameplay issues can be dealt with in their own way through matchmaking and ranking.
Attacking the lowest common denominator is rarely helpful. If some people overreact, you have to address the reasonable complaints instead of just telling them there's no problem. That will keep the conversation more civil than just telling them the reason they are frustrated is because they are racists.
And this justifies the speech isolated in the OP as problematic? We are now back to the OP and my interpretation of a post in this thread, which on-point answers your bigoted response.
Gameplay issues can be dealt with in their own way through matchmaking and ranking.
No amount of "matchmaking and ranking" is going to fix the issue of not being able to communicate. I don't give a damn who's behind the monitor, if they can play with a team and have fun, more power to them. But when the invis rune Enigma shows up out of nowhere and wins a fight that makes us lose rax, I'm going to be annoyed with the guy who watched him grab it and couldn't say anything when he deliberately checked a box that says "Yes, I can communicate with English-speaking teammates on the US East server".
If they are bad, they will drop in ranking. If you aren't bad, you will not follow them.
Or we are back to: everyone who is not-white and not an English speaker is bad. We can separate gameplay issues from racist knee-jerk reactions, if only a little thought is given to the matter.
There is also the issue that the portion of the Brazilian players that do actually speak english, or don't and just play SA server, is transparent to people. If the guy is speaking english on US East the only way you might think he is not american is the ping, which might be 150~200ms or so (maybe steam profile sometimes), but still you can't say where he is from, maybe it's Europe or whatever, so you just won't know.
So people just get see the bad side really.
I think a good current analogy could be made with Republicans. If you look at the media you will probably think Republicans are all god damn stupid people, but I'm sure there are plenty of them who are quite reasonable (e.g. Jon Huntsman), but a vocal portion of the party drives public opinion much easier, especially the part of the public that is mostly uninformed.
On October 19 2013 05:55 itsjustatank wrote: If they are bad, they will drop in ranking. If you aren't bad, you will not follow them.
Or we are back to: everyone who is not-white and not an English speaker is bad. We can separate gameplay issues from racist knee-jerk reactions, if only a little thought is given to the matter.
Someone who can't communicate doesn't have to be "bad", why is that so difficult? Competent players of any language/nationality make mistakes, it'd be silly to discern differences among them. But when you can't speak, many more mistakes happen that shouldn't.
In the last example, a 5th player saw Enigma grab an Invisibility rune and move towards the rest of the team making a push.
The correct response is to notify your teammates of the impending danger, and it would be a mistake to assume that they can/will see anything you noticed.
If our teammate here can't talk to his allies regardless, then it doesn't matter how observant he is, the game is going to shift to the opponent's favor because he couldn't talk. That's the real issue with "Dem gosh dern ferners in muh 'Merrican servers". No one cares who you are or where you play from (unless you have ridiculous ping and literally cannot play, but that's a different story), but when you can't communicate in a team game you might as well be an AI.
On October 19 2013 05:55 itsjustatank wrote: If they are bad, they will drop in ranking. If you aren't bad, you will not follow them.
Or we are back to: everyone who is not-white and not an English speaker is bad. We can separate gameplay issues from racist knee-jerk reactions, if only a little thought is given to the matter.
Of course !
And the point isn't "These people are not english speakers, they're bad".
It's "They can't communicate in a friggin' TEAM game". I believe it is a quite obvious issue that doesn't require that much thoughts... And it has nothing to do with racism at all... :/
The curious thing is that most "Brazillians" in USE are not from Brazil. People from Brazil play in the SA server, unless it's not working for some reason. Few people want to play with worse latency. But anyone that speaks spanish is regarded as a "BR" by random internet warriors.
BR means south american by now (no it doesn't make sense). Its not like Peruvians who speak Spanish are better at communication with english-speaking americans compared to Brazilians who speak Portuguese.
On October 19 2013 04:57 itsjustatank wrote: You can go ahead and justify your latent racism, in your own way. Your argument relies on the premise that all people who are non-English speakers will necessarily be people who "throw" games.
Stop throwing around the word "racist" so much. It's emotionally charged, doesn't make a point and is abused far more than it is used. It destroys conversations and ruins whatever chance there is of reasonable communication. Also, it gets misused a lot, like right here. You're calling people racists solely for disliking people who cannot communicate in a team game, where communication is vital. Being incapable of communication is objectively harmful to one's team and directly harms the experience of the players. Nationality, race and actual in-game skill is completely secondary to the fact that a person deliberately hopped on a server where they knew few people would not speak their language, and then proceeded to cripple a team due to their inability to communicate. Racism is only racism when one applies blanket-hatred to an entire group of people for no rational reason and/or no reason based in objective fact.
On October 19 2013 04:57 itsjustatank wrote: You can go ahead and justify your latent racism, in your own way. Your argument relies on the premise that all people who are non-English speakers will necessarily be people who "throw" games.
Stop throwing around the word "racist" so much. It's emotionally charged, doesn't make a point and is abused far more than it is used. It destroys conversations and ruins whatever chance there is of reasonable communication. Also, it gets misused a lot, like right here. You're calling people racists solely for disliking people who cannot communicate in a team game, where communication is vital. Being incapable of communication is objectively harmful to one's team and directly harms the experience of the players. Nationality, race and actual in-game skill is completely secondary to the fact that a person deliberately hopped on a server where they knew few people would not speak their language, and then proceeded to cripple a team due to their inability to communicate. Racism is only racism when one applies blanket-hatred to an entire group of people for no rational reason and/or no reason based in objective fact.
Here is a little food for thought from personal experience.
When I first started playing Dota2 I was living in China (still do actually but I'm back in NA on an extended business trip)
Anyway for obvious ping and location reasons I played pretty much exclusively on the China/HK servers (not there anymore I believe) and the SEA servers. Now, my Chinese is actually decent, but as everyone knows, online game lingo and conversational language is completely different, so I was still basically at a loss for a lot of things beyond just getting the gist. Note that I did still queue English Language servers.
However, pretty quickly my Chinese teammates would realize that I was a foreigner... sometimes they did instinctively call me bad before the game started, but this was a time when the Chinese were legitimately "that much better" than everyone else, so usually just made me shrug and laugh. But more importantly, they would actually TRY to communicate in English, they made the effort to use their broken speaking to communicate and they for the most part could understand things like 'b' 'push' 'gank' etc.
This does seem a little irrelevant as I type it just because English is a much more universal language than Portuguese, for example. Just thought I would share a foreigner on a foreign language region server story.
I'm glad we're talking about this, but I don't really like your post because it seems like you skirt around the actual issues. yes there are some people who think all Russians are bad or all Brazilians are trolls or whatever. Its pretty well known that those people are in the minority and wrong.
The real issue is communication. I'm from the western United States so I queue on the USW server. I'm also an English speaker so I put English as my language. I want to be matched with other people in North America who also speak English. This isn't because foreigners are any worse players or any worse people. Its because people queuing on my server from far away locations (for example, South America) have bad ping which makes their play worse and people who don't speak English cannot effectively communicate with the rest of the team, making teamwork harder. This gives the team with the foreigner a disadvantage.
Now, to address some of the main counter arguments. Some people will say "what are people who live in North America, but don't speak English (Mexicans for example) supposed to do?". Well there are actually 6 language options for USW. English, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese. The odds of someone living in North America and not speaking a single one of those languages is so low that I would expect to almost never see them in matchmaking. For those few who do fall into this category, I don't think there's any practical way to avoid the language barrier and I think it would be fine if someone speaking, say, Japanese queued on the USW English servers if they lived in North America.
The other main thing I hear is that non english speakers and non-North Americans queue on USW and USE because there's shorter wait times. Right now the average wait time for my server (USW) is 1:51. The average wait for Russia is 2:19, and South America 2:07. That's a difference of 28 or 17 seconds respectively. I don't think saving 28 seconds of match finding is worth ruining a game for 4 other people because you can't communicate with them.
For the record, this is not a "English speakers vs the world" thing. If I queue on the Chinese server from America and select Chinese as my language (which I speak none of) I'm being an ass hole. Same would go for queueing on Russian server in Russian or whatever.
And it should be no surprise why Russians and South Americans get the brunt of the blame for this. The majority of people queuing in the 2 US servers who don't speak the language they selected are Spanish or Portuguese speakers and the majority of people who do the same in Europe are Russian speakers. Its not that Russians are all ass holes or anything, there's just a lot of them. So there are also more russian ass holes than, say, Lithuanian ass holes, even if they're in the same ratio.
There are probably plenty of normal, considerate Russians who queue on the Russian server with Russian as their language and don't bother anyone else. But we don't see those people. So, when people say stuff like "god dammit I got Russians on my team" what they really mean is "god dammit I got the Russians that don't speak english and queued on Western Europe English anyway because they're fucking ass holes and now I can't communicate with half my team at all"
Lovely writeup. Shame you're just outright wrong on this one. Que on as many servers as you want, but be prepared to speak the language that is mainly spoken there. It doesn't matter where the station is placed, what matters is the language its meant to be played as. For two of those, its pure main english. And yes, you can go "stick it" if you queue up for a server where you have no ability to communicate with the people you're about to play with.
Exceptions are nationalities where there's simply no server to play on for any language they might speak. This is NOT the case for Russians and Brazilians. So they can go "stick it" as well.
You've managed to put more bias and irrationality behind your arguments than the people who blindly hate on foreigners, well done, that must have taken a lot of effort.
Stop supporting retards joining English speaking servers when they can't speak English, and trying to say "well u only no englsh so u cnt tlk" is plain dumb.
You made a few funny videos about Dota, stop getting ahead of yourself and thinking your opinion is even remotely valid, you're an idiot.
On October 19 2013 03:15 PyrionFlax wrote: So for the love of Gabe can we PLEASE try to get along and stop all this stupid cloaked xenophobia? Because it plays into the hands of certain groups of people I like to call “Shitlords”, and Shitlords want us all to hate each other and assume we’re better than everyone
All right Pflax, this is why you can't be taken serious. You can't even subtly hide your radical feminism and SJW rhetoric in your post.
Hey guys, I queue on the Australian server, so I'm not basing this off personal experience, but is there any chance that the MMR -> Skill ratios could be different on different servers?
Meaning that players on different servers could have the same MMR but different skill levels, so that when they come over to a different server, even though they are matched with players with the same MMR, their actual skill level would be different.
I think Dota should also have an option where you could only play with people that are actually on your server (ex. people on US East can only play with other people on US East). In the US East server, there are a ton of South Americans. I take intro Spanish in university and I can understand some of the things they can say, but I actually feel bad for people who don't understand them and they end up being blamed for throwing/losing the game. Yes, there is a chat wheel that we can use for basic communication, but it is tremendously limited and it becomes more useless when trying to instruct or tell people what to do in team fights. Communication is an extremely essential part of any team game and sometimes, the chat wheel just doesn't cut it.
Lastly, people from other servers should also expect lag when playing in other areas... Every once in a while, a Russian/Chinese player comes along and complains about having 200+ ping in the NA servers.
@Pyrion: Morally respectable, but totally insufficient in execution and scope. It's not useful to categorise "I don't understand this person" as equivalent to actual racism. Dota 2 is a team game about heroes with innate differences playing into each others' strengths and weaknesses, and that means your team sees measurable harm if you and a teammate are fundamentally incapable of communicating with each other. And if your enemies all speak the same language, the disadvantage is magnified.
I've played with many a Russian in my time, and the ones that could speak English were more often than not the ones I played well with, because we could understand each other and act in unison. I've probably played with hundreds of black Americans, Romanians, South Africans, the French, the Norwegian, the Dutch, even Chinese and Korean... none of it mattered to me unless there's a language barrier, and often there wasn't one. Queueing for languages you don't understand at all is so obviously counterproductive for everyone - including the picker - that it blows my mind that anyone would even disagree with me, let alone actually do the same thing themselves. Hell, if you can understand the basics, like "b" means you need to go back and be safe, then that's serviceable for a pub match on an English server. If you can't even parse a fucking ping in the jungle 800 units from you when everyone is missing, and then you bitch in a language nobody on your team understands, then there's a problem.
I think the real problem is that people who play dota-type games will blame their teammates first under any circumstances. Pointing to their nationality grants an additional layer of separation, Nothing anyone says will change this. Anyone that plays a team game consisting of 5 people will have a roughly 20% chance of changing their fate as to whether they win or lose. This is pretty much impossible for the human psyche, to accept losing due to circumstances beyond their control. Their instinct will tell them to control the incontrollable - and they'll open their mouth and begin attempting away. I've seen it one hundred thousand times.
Why do you think the term 'starcraft elitist' even exists in a lexicon anywhere? Because we refuse to lay the blame anywhere but ourselves. It's part of the burden, and we shoulder it happily.
In response to some of the posts in this thread: Like I said, people being dickheads are just people being dickheads. The problem I have is with people saying that it's their nationality that makes them dickheads. And that's not racism, it's xenophobia, so the guy saying that people "cry racism" too often is oddly enough crying racism himself. I didn't use that word.
And BAD players who don't speak English are going to be bad even if they DID speak English. Some of the best players I've randomly queued with have not had to say a word beyond pings and the chatwheel. That could have been Vladimir Putin himself. It's great that people think the only problem is the language barrier but I honestly think that more often than not it's just that those players are bad players.
And guess where Dota is most popular – Brazil, Russia, China and the USA. Now I play on US East, EU West and EU East servers, so I can’t speak from experience when it comes to Chinese players. But I can say with a lot of certainty that there will be the same distribution of bad and good players among their population as there is in all the other countries of the World.
I call fucking bullshit on this. Ask any SEA player and they will tell you with certainty that Chinese players are better players. Just because your experience is limited only to the West doesn't mean that it is the same everywhere else in the world.
We have our own problems here in SEA, and that is the Filipinos. I can tell you for a fact that it is more of the attitude problem that most Filipinos present rather than their individual skill level which gives them a bad name. As a matter of fact, Filipinos speak much better English than Chinese players and yet I would rather play with Chinese players 10 times out of 10. Most of the times, it is not that they cannot communicate in English, but they would rather not because they have their own friends in the game and would rather exclude the other players from their private conversations.
So stop with your generalizing and one-sided tirades and maybe you could look at the scene from a bigger perspective - that the fault does not only lie with those who are 'xenophobic' in your own words, they are also present with those who are the victims of the 'xenophobia'.
Thanks for the good laugh. I think this sentence should be used as a disclaimer whenever someone does a numerical analysis of the game "Time for a simple statistical mathematical scientifical break-down. I don’t care if this isn’t accurate or if the numbers don’t add up". Never bad to remind yourself to forget this nationalistic bullshit either.
However on a more serious note I'd like to add that the popularity of the game in each country means that you will have different demographics playing it. I feel like people playing dota in western europe and the US tend to be "older" than the typical gamer population because younger player mostly play league of legends. However in a country where ukraine where dota2 is extremely popular you tend to have younger players that don't behave correctly on the internet ^^.
You tried to combine the point that you can't blame other people for you losing and people from outside your country/language queuing in your country/language and it didn't fucking work. This post is really fucking dumb and doesn't show how hating foreigners is counterproductive at all. This doesn't deserve to be on the front page. Like literally every paragraph is just filled with information that doesn't have anything to do with the point you are trying to make. The only thing that comes out of this is that you can't blame other people for your loss and the average skill level is the same in all countries. Literally no other point is made at all. I can't believe this got put on the home page.
On October 19 2013 04:29 StarBrift wrote: I've played about 1500 games of dota 2 and not a single time have I ever been screamed at in french, german, turkish, italian or english. English is the most spoken language on EU west and still russian rage moments are far more common. Any half way intelligent person knows this isn't because of these people being russian. It's individuals acting extremely badly and without respect for their fellow players. Well you don't treat these individuals with respect. You scorn and ostricize them until they've learned to play nice. Or you tell them to get the fuck out and go back to their own playground.
Everytime I got screamed at in Dota was in english.
I have yet to play with a russian who understands/uses english ingame. And with that said, 75% of the people I get to play with on EU West is russians. It's just not fun.
I feel like this blog too would have worked out better as your usual youtube video.
Personally I'm pretty much over with the whole nationality thing, if people don't communicate then they don't communicate and if they speak some russian'ish language I mute them and play the game.
It's not so much as an internationality problem as a language problem. If you want to play on a server you should try to speak the language of that server, or you give your team a higher chance to lose. It's as simple as that.
I think the kind of "russians" that's actually being despised is the kind you meet 4 of when you've only checked the english language and you have a game full of "cyka blyat".
sorry if i dont join the circle j**k here flax, but if theres an option in a game that makes you play with people that checked the same language , when you then check that option,but dont have a basic understanding of that language and refuse to communicate in game in which communication is all important, then you deserve the report you`re getting from me.
I agree that you shouldent be a flaming asshole about it, but id like the same consideration from the guy in front of the other monitor that im giving him please.
You guys are being a bit naive, obviously there are brazilians who will go into US servers to fuck around with gringos. It's either that or a strange desire to play with quadruple the ping.
I play on South America and my nickname isn't in portuguese, so people assume I'm a foreigner and actually talk english to me a lot.
Honestly, the issue is a two-way street. I've played against a peruvian stack that claimed to deliberately come to the NA servers specifically to "kill americans" because they "don't know how to attack". I've played with more than one "time to stomp american noobs" player name or some variation thereof, played with people that start the match by openly declaring their distaste for americans...
Of course, I play with a Texan that generally hates other cultures/languages, have played with many an angry english-speaker blaming non-english teammates (and admittedly been there myself. That said, the not-speaking-english is just assumed by the fact that they're not speaking at all, half the time. I'm not assaulting them based on their nationality; I'm assaulting them based on their refusal or inability to communicate.) and have had my fair share of anger towards my teammates and/or DotA. While not necessary, it is pretty darn human. I agree with the sentiment that it should be avoided, but disagree with the notion that DotA is the origin of any xenophobia!
Myself, I'm Candian, so the attacks on americans don't affect me directly, but they do make me sympathize with any returned dislike of other languages playing on english-chosen NA servers. Sure, it's the "right choice" to be kind to them anyways, but I have a hard time judging others for something I'm not entirely sure I'd be able to do myself.
Everything would be fixed if Valve developed an in game translating program. All the Portuguese or Russian would become english, and vice versa for them.
Being a Brazilian myself, I used to play on the SA server because of the lower ping and it was unbearable. Almost every game had one or more toxic player, which ended up in intentional feeding or a flame war on the chat/mic. Since them Ive being playing on the US East server, slightly laggier but at least people were better on average (US east is also full of idiots but at least they arent using the effing mic to rape my ears).
While its undeniable that being an asshole isnt a nationality trait, you cant deny that people from the same country in GENERAL (not all) will behaves similarly. Brazilians tends to complain way more about others mistakes. Not only on online games but even IRL. Brazil is a shit underdeveloped country and its population is partially to blame on that. Im glad that since October I moved out of that shit
And size of the country doesnt matter shit on an online game when communication matters, just because everybody is doing it wrong they are okay because theyre majority? This is not some shit democracy. Valve should implement language bans, so people who choose the correct filter arent fucked up by a bunch of analphabets that only knows how to hit play and swear in game.
pflax, I love you. will link this every single fucking time from now on when somebody starts whining about players of nationality-x being bad and whatnot. let's hope tl can deal with all the traffic that will hopefully generate...
True but not a fun read. Maybe I lack some reading skills to understand the subleties. I would have prefered a monty python announcer tbh, I would have bought it for sure.
Coming from Starcraft where it's mostly GG ,GLHF and Cancer seemed that every person spoke english, playing Dota was kind of a shock for me because nobody did.
In almost every country English is taught in schools and that level would suffice for simple in-game chat, plus if you consider that they probably are nerds and spend their life on the internet means that they are well exposed to English.
Speaking 4 languages i can make out what most of them are talking about and the way i see it is that they think to be the majority (probably true) and speak their language to annoy others and maybe push them away from their game.
But that's exactly what English speakers do so....
first of all: the blog is fun to read due to nice choice of words and anecdotes. BUT pflax misses a crucial point. Stereotypes dont come out of thin air. Who cares if teammates dont speak english? Only morons. The only thing that matters is skill and teamplay. Russians have skilled and lesser skilled played - like every other nation. BUT they get mad way faster. I dont know what`s up with them: the party harder, the drink harder, they punch harder and they rage harder. If your teams gives up firstblood or gets behind in the early game, this might be enough to trigger a verbal russian diarrhea attack, which has to be muted and is followed up by gamethrowing or gameleaving. Where are the swedish ragelords? Where are the spanish ragelords? Where are the french ragelords? Adding up all other european raging kids who crossed my ways in dota2, are outnumbered by russian ragelords in 1:4 ratio.
On October 19 2013 15:51 PyrionFlax wrote: In response to some of the posts in this thread: Like I said, people being dickheads are just people being dickheads. The problem I have is with people saying that it's their nationality that makes them dickheads. And that's not racism, it's xenophobia, so the guy saying that people "cry racism" too often is oddly enough crying racism himself. I didn't use that word.
And BAD players who don't speak English are going to be bad even if they DID speak English. Some of the best players I've randomly queued with have not had to say a word beyond pings and the chatwheel. That could have been Vladimir Putin himself. It's great that people think the only problem is the language barrier but I honestly think that more often than not it's just that those players are bad players.
I hope you weren't referring to me. I was talking about itsjustatank and the things he said in this thread, not you.
On October 19 2013 04:57 itsjustatank wrote: You can go ahead and justify your latent racism, in your own way. Your argument relies on the premise that all people who are non-English speakers will necessarily be people who "throw" games.
Stop throwing around the word "racist" so much. It's emotionally charged, doesn't make a point and is abused far more than it is used. It destroys conversations and ruins whatever chance there is of reasonable communication. Also, it gets misused a lot, like right here. You're calling people racists solely for disliking people who cannot communicate in a team game, where communication is vital. Being incapable of communication is objectively harmful to one's team and directly harms the experience of the players. Nationality, race and actual in-game skill is completely secondary to the fact that a person deliberately hopped on a server where they knew few people would not speak their language, and then proceeded to cripple a team due to their inability to communicate. Racism is only racism when one applies blanket-hatred to an entire group of people for no rational reason and/or no reason based in objective fact.
This is nice but doesn't answer anything, especially in context. You can dislike people who play badly. You make assumptions that people who you cannot communicate with deliberately do so; you also assume they are bad. The rest of the people trying to justify their actions here make assumptions that everyone from X nationality are people who they cannot communicate with and play the game deliberately to spite them. These issues can be solved from a game design standpoint. How the community deals with its speech and its racist implications is another thing entirely.
Xenophobia is fear of the other, and the prime enabler of racism. I use the word racist because the speech acts of the community are very focused on nationality and ethnicity. If this makes you uncomfortable, you should examine why that is so.
And guess where Dota is most popular – Brazil, Russia, China and the USA. Now I play on US East, EU West and EU East servers, so I can’t speak from experience when it comes to Chinese players. But I can say with a lot of certainty that there will be the same distribution of bad and good players among their population as there is in all the other countries of the World.
I call fucking bullshit on this. Ask any SEA player and they will tell you with certainty that Chinese players are better players. Just because your experience is limited only to the West doesn't mean that it is the same everywhere else in the world.
We have our own problems here in SEA, and that is the Filipinos. I can tell you for a fact that it is more of the attitude problem that most Filipinos present rather than their individual skill level which gives them a bad name. As a matter of fact, Filipinos speak much better English than Chinese players and yet I would rather play with Chinese players 10 times out of 10. Most of the times, it is not that they cannot communicate in English, but they would rather not because they have their own friends in the game and would rather exclude the other players from their private conversations.
So stop with your generalizing and one-sided tirades and maybe you could look at the scene from a bigger perspective - that the fault does not only lie with those who are 'xenophobic' in your own words, they are also present with those who are the victims of the 'xenophobia'.
You are wrong. I played on both Perfect World and US servers. There are plenty of awful players on both servers. The only difference is that every Chinese dota player seems to think that he's a tactical genius whose game knowledge is unparalleled. I ran into complete idiots bossing you around and trying to call the shots, only to go MOM on sniper, activate it and get insta-gibbed from full hp with a single lina ult. To presume that there is something genetic that makes players of X nationality better at a video game is just absurd.
On October 20 2013 02:58 itsjustatank wrote: If this makes you uncomfortable, you should examine why that is so.
Your tone through this entire thing has been condescending, self-righteous and downright mean. People are presenting an actual problem (inability to communicate in a team game) and all you've done is demonize and finger point. And when people call you out on it, you double down and say "If being called a racist makes you uncomfortable, maybe you are one.". This isn't civil discourse, this is PC thuggery.
On October 19 2013 07:28 AnachronisticAnarchy wrote:
On October 19 2013 04:57 itsjustatank wrote: You can go ahead and justify your latent racism, in your own way. Your argument relies on the premise that all people who are non-English speakers will necessarily be people who "throw" games.
Stop throwing around the word "racist" so much. It's emotionally charged, doesn't make a point and is abused far more than it is used. It destroys conversations and ruins whatever chance there is of reasonable communication. Also, it gets misused a lot, like right here. You're calling people racists solely for disliking people who cannot communicate in a team game, where communication is vital. Being incapable of communication is objectively harmful to one's team and directly harms the experience of the players. Nationality, race and actual in-game skill is completely secondary to the fact that a person deliberately hopped on a server where they knew few people would not speak their language, and then proceeded to cripple a team due to their inability to communicate. Racism is only racism when one applies blanket-hatred to an entire group of people for no rational reason and/or no reason based in objective fact.
This is nice but doesn't answer anything, especially in context. You can dislike people who play badly. You make assumptions that people who you cannot communicate with deliberately do so; you also assume they are bad. The rest of the people trying to justify their actions here make assumptions that everyone from X nationality are people who they cannot communicate with and play the game deliberately to spite them. These issues can be solved from a game design standpoint. How the community deals with its speech and its racist implications is another thing entirely.
Xenophobia is fear of the other, and the prime enabler of racism. I use the word racist because the speech acts of the community are very focused on nationality and ethnicity. If this makes you uncomfortable, you should examine why that is so.
Why are you trying so hard to pidgeonhole everyone who disagrees with you as a racist. All of your posts from the reply with the picture of the colored restroom have been sensationalist.
We are simply stating we want to play with people who speak our language, not join a game with a stack of Spanish speakers, and start discussing hero picks immediately leaving us out of the loop. Are you have done is say our concerns are invalid, and use your internet degree to evaluate us as racists.
Someone should write a guide/create a standard for comunicating solely with the chat wheel and pings and we as a community should popularize it world wide
On October 19 2013 06:00 Souone wrote: There is also the issue that the portion of the Brazilian players that do actually speak english, or don't and just play SA server, is transparent to people. If the guy is speaking english on US East the only way you might think he is not american is the ping, which might be 150~200ms or so (maybe steam profile sometimes), but still you can't say where he is from, maybe it's Europe or whatever, so you just won't know.
So people just get see the bad side really.
I think a good current analogy could be made with Republicans. If you look at the media you will probably think Republicans are all god damn stupid people, but I'm sure there are plenty of them who are quite reasonable (e.g. Jon Huntsman), but a vocal portion of the party drives public opinion much easier, especially the part of the public that is mostly uninformed.
This is somewhat off topic but THANK YOU. I am a moderate republican and I do not think or act ANYTHING like the the Republicans you see saying and doing stupid shit on tv.
Getting back on topic and relating to the the Republican point.... isnt this whole russian vs brazillian vs dota community just a little misunderstanding? I think thats what pflax is saying anyways.
Cant we resolve our differences or are we so zealous we want to drive this thing into a blood feud and continue to let it kill a little bit of the community?
Here's the two important things you missed that truly explain why people dislike playing with people that don't speak their language:
1) A lot of people play DotA 2 and enjoy making smartass remarks. If your team doesn't speak English/Espangol/Francais, whatever, they can't appreciate your smartass wisecracking or passive-aggressive build critiquing. There goes some of your fun.
2) Hearing other people constantly speaking (or seeing them typing) what is to you total nonsense is distracting and incredibly annoying. So you mute them and now you get to rely on the chat wheel and pings which are (mostly due to point one) generally used to make smartass remarks.
It's that simple.
Edit: I mean, sure you can spam chat wheel at people that don't speak your language to make smartass remarks, but that's just not as satisfying as asking them whether their father was exposed to radioactive waste before conceiving them, is it?
I agree with most of the things Pyrion listed, but I have to say it is really annoying when you queue on whatever server (I play on EU west since that's where I live) and only tick english or whatever language and STILL end up playing with people who refuse to use said language except when they insult you or your mom. If they can't speak *selected language* then they should go play on their own server if they have one (which is often the case, and that's why people are so mad at them) or at least use external communication so that you don't have to put up with people yelling in spanish or chinese or whatever on the voice chat. Personally, me and my friends use Skype where we talk in our language and in the in-game chat we use english because that's what you're expected to do if you tick english language. I fail to see how not communicating, or communicating but only in a foreign language, is a good thing. I don't go playing on the russian/brazilian/SEA/etc server because 1. it'll give me bad ping, and 2. I won't understand them and they won't understand me, which means I may as well play vs bots. I just don't see the point. It is frustrating for your team mates who can't understand, and it leads to them getting mad at you, which means your own playing experience blows as well.
I strongly disagree with this article. It is perfectly reasonable to find good players from those big countries, the problem is with general mentality of people (and I'm not limiting it only to online games). I'm probably targeting this more to eastern Europeans, as I have more personal experience, originating from there. If a player is good, you are very unlikely to know what country is he from. If a player is bad, by the way they handle the losing, you can tell with a high accuracy (even if they speak English instead of Russian) what region of Europe they are from. Only quite intelligent people from Eastern Europe can get rid of the mentality, that was developed during soviet age, and whether they are playing good or bad, you are unlikely to know that they are from eastern Europe. The rest of the people are generally as bad (again, not specifically in Dota, but more in interaction with others) as someone you would immediately call an asshole from other countries.
(By the way, my extremely limited Russian skills are enough to understand what they are talking, I am fully aware of the issues with ping that connection from eastern Stockholm server, unlike Luxembourg has and I never blame pubs for being bad, because that's just waste of time. Hating to interact with players from those countries, as it is much more likely to find friendlier people with better attitude from somewhere else is an issue though.)
My issue is this: I searched for a game on whatever server (EU West say) on English language preferences. Why are there people in my game, on my team, who don't or are not speaking English? Dota is a team game, teamwork necessitates communication, good communication requires a common spoken and/or written language. Is this a failure of the Matchmaker, or the people involved?
There probably is a lot of unwarranted xenophobia directed at Russians, but its not xenophobic to want to be able to communicate with your teammates.
It's a team orientated game. I don't queue on servers that don't speak my own language because it hampers our ability to communicate and work as a team. It's not xenphobic, it's reality. It's exceedingly difficult to coordinate a team who speaks different languages without any type of common ground. While all servers/countries might have an equal proportion of good to bad players at least I can communicate with a bad player and try to minimize their negative effect on the game while hopefully teaching them something.
I cannot teach or mitigate a horrible player who cannot understand a word coming out of my mouth. It becomes frustrating and I don't enjoy it. There is nothing xenophobic about that. It's a desire to win and learn and becoming naturally frustrated at anyone who impedes that. It just so happens that when you can't communicate with your team properly they become a greater impediment and makes the game worse.
Also, I have only ever run into Mexican/Brazilian players who somehow just leave their audio on the WHOLE game while blasting shitty (Note: ANY) music.
On October 20 2013 12:25 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote: It's a team orientated game. I don't queue on servers that don't speak my own language because it hampers our ability to communicate and work as a team. It's not xenphobic, it's reality. It's exceedingly difficult to coordinate a team who speaks different languages without any type of common ground.
A trillion times this. I really do appreciate the scroll wheel and it does help a bit but you cannot, with such few options on the wheel, convey all the necessary information at times. I have nothing against people from other countries nor those that speak other languages and I understand that there isn't a server in each country for those that speak a specific language. That is a fact that does not, however, make playing a team game easier when half of your team has no idea what you're trying to tell them.
In the end, the complaint is not so much about people on a US server not speaking English as it is a complaint about not being able to clearly converse many simple things to them as the scroll wheel and pings are not catch-alls. I'm afraid until Google Translate (lol) is installed in Dota, this will be a continued issue.
What a waste of a read honestly. People are ignorant.
Pretty simple as this:
1) People who project their experiences with a culture/race/demographic onto all others of the same, are asshats.
2) People who queue with a language selected that they can't speak/comprehend, are asshats.
3) People who queue on a server that they knowingly have a terrible ping on, and spend the whole game typing "-ping", then blame their mistakes on lag, are asshats.
I think the prejudice is justified in this case. There is a cultural tendency in countries like Russia and Brazil to not take games as seriously. So it is statistically correct to say that Russians and Brazilians are mostly trolls and terrible at DotA.
On October 19 2013 23:20 opisska wrote: This blog is slightly puzzling - who is this guy who has 3 posts and 1 blog and his blog is already featured?
Yea, only thing about the blog other than the stupid arguments that followed that kinda bothered me. Someone literally coded a little banner for people to follow him. With 3 posts to contribute on TL, this kinda just feels like self advertizing -_-
I had a game where a Russian kid did the 'angry German kid' impression over his microphone (in russian of course), most memorable doto I played to this day.
On October 19 2013 23:20 opisska wrote: This blog is slightly puzzling - who is this guy who has 3 posts and 1 blog and his blog is already featured?
Yea, only thing about the blog other than the stupid arguments that followed that kinda bothered me. Someone literally coded a little banner for people to follow him. With 3 posts to contribute on TL, this kinda just feels like self advertizing -_-
I'm not aware of any post count requirement for a blog to be featured. Being somewhat of a scene insider / personality obviously helps, but that's always been the case.
Just logged in to say this was among the worst and idiotic articles I've ever read. It may be a TL feature but that doesn't stop it from being horrendous. The point is that any person that doesn't have the inherent intelligence to be able to pick up English after years and years of being online or dealing with it in some other way, they probably ARE of lesser intelligence. And before you bash me for ''then why don't you speak any other languages'', I'm able to speak 4 at a decent level. One of the most ridiculous and try-hard articles I've ever read in my life
On October 20 2013 21:56 Cosm01 wrote: Just logged in to say this was among the worst and idiotic articles I've ever read. It may be a TL feature but that doesn't stop it from being horrendous. The point is that any person that doesn't have the inherent intelligence to be able to pick up English after years and years of being online or dealing with it in some other way, they probably ARE of lesser intelligence. And before you bash me for ''then why don't you speak any other languages'', I'm able to speak 4 at a decent level. One of the most ridiculous and try-hard articles I've ever read in my life
Thank you. It saddens me when people love to circlejerk around an article without actually reading it.
Pyrion, anyone with a decent level of critical thinking can clearly see how hard you try to make a point about an issue while clearly going far from the real problem. Most of those people who are not being cooperative or/and communicative are actually doing it on purpose just because they couldn't give a damn about winning and can take their kick out of the game by watching you painfully trying to make some teamwork happen.
That’s kind of uncool, you know what I mean man? Because the internet is meant to be about, like, breaking down barriers and stuff.
I got to admit, I laughed at this part quite hard. This may be YOUR reasons to join other servers but everyone here knows why most of people do it. The main reason is the queue time. They want a game asap so they tick all the options and don't give any damn about "breaking down barriers and stuff". Seriously Pyrion, you are either naive or really oblivious about this game's playerbase.
Ask yourself this: If there was a fast queue time for all servers of all countries, do you really think russians would tick an EU West server just to ''break down barriers and stuff''?
The answer is no. Unless he wants to troll. But that, is another story.
It was such a joy reading this with PF's voice in my head!
Idea was to reply with questioning statistics but considering I've just had a rather unpleasant game involving players that seemed to originate from Russia, perhaps it would be wiser to delay it until I'd go about it in a more objective way. :D I do agree with most of the points OP presents though.
Thing is, the complaints don't necessarily have to be a bad thing when you look at the big picture. Mentioning Russians and Brazilians has become a part of Dota culture, and I'm certain a significant part of players from those countries acts in a way only to reinforce just that. People seem to take the complaints too seriously anyway.
I find the entire thing quite humorous which is why I think in general, a certain amount of stuff with a "negative" vibe to it can in the long run create a more enjoyable experience, such as complaining about Russians or other stereotypes, stuff being broken/op, unfair, demoralizing and so on.. simply because some kind of story forms around it. Maybe the new players don't immediately appreciate it, but for me it gives the game some character and even though I'm complaining about a negative experience at the time, it makes me more opinionated towards the game in the end. And as long as the game does not play out that way each time, and allows me to choose how i want it to play out (by the way i queue and with whom) I see no problem.
I like your writing style, and I certainly agree with your point on needless hate, but you're flat out wrong about languages. Yes, the internet is supposed to unite and break down boundaries yadda, yadda. But guess what, like it or not- the language of the internet (and most other "international" entities) is English. You might as well argue that everyone on TL should be allowed to write in their own language. And there's a little country right next to those awesome Switzerlands and Luxembourgs, it has cute little inhabitants who have little problem speaking English on the web even though their language is spoken by ~100 million people.
I don't care how hard you try to convince people to overlook the problem that WHEN YOU QUEUE IN EUROPEAN/US SERVERS, YOU MUST SPEAK/WRITE IN ENGLISH AT ALL COST. P.S Luxembourg servers are in the EUROPEAN SERVER PACK, so you are ok if you speak english.
Yes, russians/brazilians are cancer to Dota. Nothing new here. When they start to write in English, then I'm going to be convinced that they need to be accepted.
I respect you Mr. Flax, but in my honest opinion this was a pretty crappy article. You are missing the key point.
English is the world language. The common tongue if you will.
This is even coming from a non native English speaker who currently lives in Germany. I hate and yell on every German person I meet, telling them how ignorant they are for not picking up the world language. IMO, just because bigger countries tend to be more arrogant about learning other languages doesn't make it right.
It might be unfair that the English speaking people colonized, won wars and produced a lot of good culture. Call it what you will, their language has become the world language and anyone who doesn't learn it is, in my opinion, an ignorant fool who doesn't see the value of communication.
And guess where Dota is most popular – Brazil, Russia, China and the USA. Now I play on US East, EU West and EU East servers, so I can’t speak from experience when it comes to Chinese players. But I can say with a lot of certainty that there will be the same distribution of bad and good players among their population as there is in all the other countries of the World.
I call fucking bullshit on this. Ask any SEA player and they will tell you with certainty that Chinese players are better players. Just because your experience is limited only to the West doesn't mean that it is the same everywhere else in the world.
We have our own problems here in SEA, and that is the Filipinos. I can tell you for a fact that it is more of the attitude problem that most Filipinos present rather than their individual skill level which gives them a bad name. As a matter of fact, Filipinos speak much better English than Chinese players and yet I would rather play with Chinese players 10 times out of 10. Most of the times, it is not that they cannot communicate in English, but they would rather not because they have their own friends in the game and would rather exclude the other players from their private conversations.
So stop with your generalizing and one-sided tirades and maybe you could look at the scene from a bigger perspective - that the fault does not only lie with those who are 'xenophobic' in your own words, they are also present with those who are the victims of the 'xenophobia'.
You are wrong. I played on both Perfect World and US servers. There are plenty of awful players on both servers. The only difference is that every Chinese dota player seems to think that he's a tactical genius whose game knowledge is unparalleled. I ran into complete idiots bossing you around and trying to call the shots, only to go MOM on sniper, activate it and get insta-gibbed from full hp with a single lina ult. To presume that there is something genetic that makes players of X nationality better at a video game is just absurd.
I agree with this in principle, but the point I made was not that Chinese players are better players due to their genetics, but rather the more competitive environment in China. You could say the same with Koreans in Starcraft. They dominate the game at every major competition because of the emphasis the country has put into developing e-sports and the maturity of their competitive scene, not because they have some innate ability which allows them to simultaneously micro 5 groups of marines. Granted, the snapshot that I have of Chinese players is pretty outdated, given that that was during the times when the Chinese would play on SEA servers.
I really dislike the way you speak down to your reader in your article, when you are only pointing out completely obvious stuff, that anyone can think themselves to.
I only seems like you are trying to promote yourself with this article, the headline of the article dosen't introduce the reader at all, it simply tells them your name and something about foreigners (i thought this was about dota outside us/eu, for example chinese dota, i guess your name must be the most important message?)
I have nothing against what your article is trying to accomplish beyond the amount of stuff you put in to promote yourself, i just think you did a horrible attempt at that. Thank you for trying.
I don't think most of the anger and rage is based on reasonable expectations. It's just incredibly frustrating when a teammate doesn't do something and they seem unable to understand things like "buy courier" or pings or any other in game prompts. The language barrier turns what could be honest mistakes into borderline trolling in the eyes of the player so it becomes natural to lash out and associate Brazilians/Russians as trolls/bad players.
After reading all of this I think I have to make a thread about the hate on bad players in online games. Seriously it's everywhere and very toxic to our community...
Hahahaha I see so much hate about people not talking on English, it is really fun to read, so every single people who plays should have a high education level, and also be good at games, as well speak English even if they don't need it on 99% time of his life because they are from other country and their life-plan is not not fly to a new location or even work on things that requires them to speak more than mother tongue.
Kinda closed mind players who are supposed to be "more intelligent" because they speak English, just saying.
On October 21 2013 00:27 Bolty wrote: I respect you Mr. Flax, but in my honest opinion this was a pretty crappy article. You are missing the key point.
English is the world language. The common tongue if you will.
This is even coming from a non native English speaker who currently lives in Germany. I hate and yell on every German person I meet, telling them how ignorant they are for not picking up the world language. IMO, just because bigger countries tend to be more arrogant about learning other languages doesn't make it right.
It might be unfair that the English speaking people colonized, won wars and produced a lot of good culture. Call it what you will, their language has become the world language and anyone who doesn't learn it is, in my opinion, an ignorant fool who doesn't see the value of communication.
Oh the irony, you calling others ignorant, in that context...
This is even coming form a non native English speaker: While I agree people should try to learn another language, some may not have means, or any necessity justifying the time required, or even personal/cultural reasons, etc. There are plenty of things that you chose to ignore. And assuming that all people who don't speak English are ignorant fools is pretty fucking ignorant Besides that, to demand that people speak English to play a video-game on the European server, for example, is ridiculous. Yeah it would be nice if everyone did, but you can't require that.. Although checking English language box is kinda messed up in my opinion too if you don't speak English, unless queue times without it are just too long
+ ppl that say 90% of russian/br players that play with them are rly bad, for example, are full of shit. you just don't notice the good ones while remembering the bad. You should prolly read his article again, this was for you
On October 21 2013 06:42 Sogetsu wrote: Hahahaha I see so much hate about people not talking on English, it is really fun to read, so every single people who plays should have a high education level, and also be good at games, as well speak English even if they don't need it on 99% time of his life because they are from other country and their life-plan is not not fly to a new location or even work on things that requires them to speak more than mother tongue.
Kinda closed mind players who are supposed to be "more intelligent" because they speak English, just saying.
No one have been saying anything of the sort. What were saying is that these people who DO have the education to learn english, and their own server if they dont want to speak it, should not tick the box for "english" and then que up on an english server only to spam the chat with anythinv but english. It doesnt take a PhD to understand why thats fucking frustrating for the rest of us when the game is highly dependant on the ability to communicate with your teammates.
I think this article addresses one issue but ignores another.
People that think players from Brazil or Russia are inherently worse are just stupid. This article when directed at them is fine. I think most people can see that painting an entire country of people with the same brush when describing skill at a video game is sort of silly.
On the other hand, there is a very legitimate concern here that this article completely overlooks. Language filters. I understand that some people are impatient or curious and thus queue on multiple servers. However, you are just being a huge asshole by checking a language that you have no intention of using. If I queued on the SA servers and checked that I spoke Portuguese/Spanish/etc when I only can speak English than I'd be an asshole. You are making the game worse for everyone you are playing with and I can't imagine you're having a very enjoyable time yourself either.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to speak English when I have the English language filter set.
On a more serious note. English is considered the "international" language, the reasons behind this belong in some other discussion. But There are alot of countries (perhaps even a majority) that speaks english as a second language. My question is... why is it that Brazil and Russia does not offer english as a second language in their education?
The answer is that, well... they do. But it is optional. I dont give a bloody fuck if i play with a russian who can communicate in english. I would like to play with him as much as i would like to play with any other english speaking stranger.
However, the problem is that there is the option to queue with language selections... im not entierly sure what languages there is to choose from, but i guess it is something like russian/chinease/spanish/english. Oh right, back to the actual problem.
These people who does not speak english at all, decides to queue with english as their preffered language. Why? Because the queue times are shorter, not because they speak english.
So why is this wrong? Good of you to ask, let me explain.
If person A says "I would like to play with people who speak the language X." and person B says "I would like to play with people who speak language X.". A speaks X but B doesnt. When the game starts B will be very happy because he got his fast queue and ended up playing with people who speak X, but player A will be very dissapointed because he ended up playing with someone who speaks Y instead of X.
If you dont see that this is reason for people to be pissed off, then you are just as ignorant as i already thought.
PS. Your announcer is horrible. I want my money back.
On October 21 2013 00:27 Bolty wrote: I respect you Mr. Flax, but in my honest opinion this was a pretty crappy article. You are missing the key point.
English is the world language. The common tongue if you will.
This is even coming from a non native English speaker who currently lives in Germany. I hate and yell on every German person I meet, telling them how ignorant they are for not picking up the world language. IMO, just because bigger countries tend to be more arrogant about learning other languages doesn't make it right.
It might be unfair that the English speaking people colonized, won wars and produced a lot of good culture. Call it what you will, their language has become the world language and anyone who doesn't learn it is, in my opinion, an ignorant fool who doesn't see the value of communication.
Oh the irony, you calling others ignorant, in that context...
This is even coming form a non native English speaker: While I agree people should try to learn another language, some may not have means, or any necessity justifying the time required, or even personal/cultural reasons, etc. There are plenty of things that you chose to ignore. And assuming that all people who don't speak English are ignorant fools is pretty fucking ignorant Besides that, to demand that people speak English to play a video-game on the European server, for example, is ridiculous. Yeah it would be nice if everyone did, but you can't require that.. Although checking English language box is kinda messed up in my opinion too if you don't speak English, unless queue times without it are just too long
+ ppl that say 90% of russian/br players that play with them are rly bad, for example, are full of shit. you just don't notice the good ones while remembering the bad. You should prolly read his article again, this was for you
Uhhh... say what now? You seem extremely ignorant my man, sorry to say.
Means? I know you guys across the pond are pretty big on privatizing, but I do believe public education still exists over there too. Public education. PUBLIC... education. We all got it, even the Russians and Brazilians. They got English in school, yes sirree. They just have too much arrogance and national pride parented into them to put any focus on it.
Necessity? I barely know how to respond to this. I'm quite old but you must be older to not realize the importance of communication. Perhaps you still believe in a heavily centralized, proprietary world too? If schools could teach kids only one thing, it should be the world language. It's one of the few useful things you pick up in year 1-9, at least that was my experience. We got the friggin' internet man, and guess what. It's in friggin' English. Or at least a crushing majority of it.
I did not ignore anything. You still have yet to produce one decent reason why people should not pick up English. Means, necessity, personal/cultural reasons. All bullshit honestly. Just out of curiosity, what would a personal reason be? Your dog was killed by an English teacher? "Cultural reasons" = national pride which is one of the truly toxic and dangerous concepts in today's world.
When I join a game and 2+ people cant or refuse to speak english (which is like at least half of my games on USeast) I think "Great I can't communicate" not "great they suck". I don't understand why people voluntarily join servers where the odds are the other people can't speak your language. It's really just a total detriment to such a team based game as DOTA.
On October 21 2013 00:27 Bolty wrote: I respect you Mr. Flax, but in my honest opinion this was a pretty crappy article. You are missing the key point.
English is the world language. The common tongue if you will.
This is even coming from a non native English speaker who currently lives in Germany. I hate and yell on every German person I meet, telling them how ignorant they are for not picking up the world language. IMO, just because bigger countries tend to be more arrogant about learning other languages doesn't make it right.
It might be unfair that the English speaking people colonized, won wars and produced a lot of good culture. Call it what you will, their language has become the world language and anyone who doesn't learn it is, in my opinion, an ignorant fool who doesn't see the value of communication.
Oh the irony, you calling others ignorant, in that context...
This is even coming form a non native English speaker: While I agree people should try to learn another language, some may not have means, or any necessity justifying the time required, or even personal/cultural reasons, etc. There are plenty of things that you chose to ignore. And assuming that all people who don't speak English are ignorant fools is pretty fucking ignorant Besides that, to demand that people speak English to play a video-game on the European server, for example, is ridiculous. Yeah it would be nice if everyone did, but you can't require that.. Although checking English language box is kinda messed up in my opinion too if you don't speak English, unless queue times without it are just too long
+ ppl that say 90% of russian/br players that play with them are rly bad, for example, are full of shit. you just don't notice the good ones while remembering the bad. You should prolly read his article again, this was for you
Uhhh... say what now? You seem extremely ignorant my man, sorry to say.
Means? I know you guys across the pond are pretty big on privatizing, but I do believe public education still exists over there too. Public education. PUBLIC... education. We all got it, even the Russians and Brazilians. They got English in school, yes sirree. They just have too much arrogance and national pride parented into them to put any focus on it.
Necessity? I barely know how to respond to this. I'm quite old but you must be older to not realize the importance of communication. Perhaps you still believe in a heavily centralized, proprietary world too? If schools could teach kids only one thing, it should be the world language. It's one of the few useful things you pick up in year 1-9, at least that was my experience. We got the friggin' internet man, and guess what. It's in friggin' English. Or at least a crushing majority of it.
I did not ignore anything. You still have yet to produce one decent reason why people should not pick up English. Means, necessity, personal/cultural reasons. All bullshit honestly. Just out of curiosity, what would a personal reason be? Your dog was killed by an English teacher? "Cultural reasons" = national pride which is one of the truly toxic and dangerous concepts in today's world.
Man, even with Public Education people learn to say APPLE and MOTHER, maybe few more things and they are done, next year, and the whole thing starts again... and guess what! It doesn't matter because point 2
Necessity? What of it? They just don't need it, they are used to get all the things on their mother tongue, they don't aim to jobs on other countries, most people who wasn't putting effort in learning English, will simply see they don't really need it for their common live, there are plenty of info over internet on their language, there are translators (although they are horrible usually)
It is a matter of idiosyncrasy, not about being stupid or bad players. I am surrounded by people who play, work, search for info over the internet and many things on their common life without needing English or simply avoiding it. It is not NEEDED for the standard life or standard persons on this world. It is quite useful and can open you a lot of possibilities MAYBE if you aim for a specific job, traveling, playing something on English ONLY, and such.
I myself learned English because I wanted, not because the school -_-U, and when I for instance try to teach something about StarCraft II usually try to give them links of DAY9 Archives, so I ask (on Spanish) "Do you speak English?" If they say to me "No", well... I am like "Damn... well, try this other thing on Spanish" , but I don't think "How dumb this mofos are not speaking English"
I played on many games with people from Asia and have no idea how to communicate, but I do what I can, they are not FORCED to learn English or any other language.
The remarkable and questionable problem is "They have their own server on his language, so they should stick at it unless they can communicate in English to join other if they want" But half of people here is plain and simply saying "They are shitty dumb players because they don't speak English"
On October 21 2013 00:27 Bolty wrote: I respect you Mr. Flax, but in my honest opinion this was a pretty crappy article. You are missing the key point.
English is the world language. The common tongue if you will.
This is even coming from a non native English speaker who currently lives in Germany. I hate and yell on every German person I meet, telling them how ignorant they are for not picking up the world language. IMO, just because bigger countries tend to be more arrogant about learning other languages doesn't make it right.
It might be unfair that the English speaking people colonized, won wars and produced a lot of good culture. Call it what you will, their language has become the world language and anyone who doesn't learn it is, in my opinion, an ignorant fool who doesn't see the value of communication.
Oh the irony, you calling others ignorant, in that context...
This is even coming form a non native English speaker: While I agree people should try to learn another language, some may not have means, or any necessity justifying the time required, or even personal/cultural reasons, etc. There are plenty of things that you chose to ignore. And assuming that all people who don't speak English are ignorant fools is pretty fucking ignorant Besides that, to demand that people speak English to play a video-game on the European server, for example, is ridiculous. Yeah it would be nice if everyone did, but you can't require that.. Although checking English language box is kinda messed up in my opinion too if you don't speak English, unless queue times without it are just too long
+ ppl that say 90% of russian/br players that play with them are rly bad, for example, are full of shit. you just don't notice the good ones while remembering the bad. You should prolly read his article again, this was for you
Uhhh... say what now? You seem extremely ignorant my man, sorry to say.
Means? I know you guys across the pond are pretty big on privatizing, but I do believe public education still exists over there too. Public education. PUBLIC... education. We all got it, even the Russians and Brazilians. They got English in school, yes sirree. They just have too much arrogance and national pride parented into them to put any focus on it.
Necessity? I barely know how to respond to this. I'm quite old but you must be older to not realize the importance of communication. Perhaps you still believe in a heavily centralized, proprietary world too? If schools could teach kids only one thing, it should be the world language. It's one of the few useful things you pick up in year 1-9, at least that was my experience. We got the friggin' internet man, and guess what. It's in friggin' English. Or at least a crushing majority of it.
I did not ignore anything. You still have yet to produce one decent reason why people should not pick up English. Means, necessity, personal/cultural reasons. All bullshit honestly. Just out of curiosity, what would a personal reason be? Your dog was killed by an English teacher? "Cultural reasons" = national pride which is one of the truly toxic and dangerous concepts in today's world.
Buddy your post is the definition of ignorance yet again. An easy example - you dont know me and you assume i believe in heavily centralized world for example? and so on. When was the last time you went to Russia? Or Other Eastern European Countries? Br too? That's right, you assume, and you know what assume means? Mean's your prolly right, but not in this case;) I'm pretty sure you did manage to make an ASS out of U, and ME most likely. Even if you visited those countries, you probably did not live there long enough
Anywho, yes means are still important.. Glad it's not for you and in a lot of countires it may not be an issue, but there are still places where it is. Not all schools teach English, or at least used to back in the day. So someone my age, 27, could have gone to school and had no opportunity to learn English, or have the money to take private classes/outside classes, which was the alternative back then. I was lucky and due to connection my parents managed to get me into school with a good English program. Not everyone was, or had parents that made that a priority. Yes you are ignorant because not everyone had the means, or has them in some countries im sure. Or had parents that would put them on that path Necessity - while it doesn't apply to most people, take someone who has no plans to move to a different country, let's say in Moldova, has a local business running, or works at a factory job (as if we had those'P) and has no plans to move out. And has 3 kids to feed..... he/she has no necessity to learn English. If anything he would first make sure his kids learn the language. At least for him/her it is definitely not a priority. But ya, even if u can't imagine it from your high horse, there are actually people that have little need of learning English in their current situation and would be much better off learning something else if they had an opportunity.
I never said people shouldn't pick up English, I'm all for learning other languages.
Cultural reason, fine I'll give you a real life example. Not with English, with Russian, but similar parallels apply. In Moldova, which has a large Russian speaking population and where knowing Russian is very useful, government is shutting down Russian schools and is trying to get rid of the language there. Some people are actually discouraged/refuse to learn Russian due to Soviet oppression (as in Fuck Russians due to nationalism, which I agree with your opinion on for the most part). Ya blew ur mind, I know, there can actually be cultural reasons.. I personally know people that refuse to speak Russian or have their kids learn it only due to those.
Personal reasons are similar.
Stop with ur absolutes and really do get off your high horse. Real life can place limits on people's options. And while if you have time and resources to play dota 2 (interwebz + comp costs) you can probably afford to take English classes, it's just not for everyone and none of us is perfect.
Idk how many people speak English in the world, but let's say it's 50% (iirc only about 400mil are native speakers, so fuck it add a few billions to that, yes here im just assuming). The point is that a lot of people don't speak English. You called maybe 50% of Earth's population ignorant fools and now you try to argue that you are not ignorant. Thank about it;) And stop talking about other places and people like you lived there and know what is going on in people's lives. it's actually offensive
p.s. Fault in your logic. People that were taught English in school, they would know enough if the system worked to communicate over dota. So either they never learned English because they didn't have it in school, or the program was shit, or... i hope u get my point. Even if you near fail English class you could still communicate at least a lil bit, if you had one of course
re-re-re edit: I apologize for the wall of text and for derailing, for some reason this really got to me tt
* If a russian or brazilian do not know English, they should probably not play with the English filter. I don't demand that every single person in the world learn English, but I'm pretty fucking surprised when you refuse to learn English for some reason, yet feel entitled to play a teamgame with everyone who did. They have enough players playing in their languages and if the queues are so terrible, they can probably spend a few weeks learning the most common terms such as buy courier, missing mid etc.
* I don't know about brazilians, but there's a good reason why russians are often worse. It's not because russians are dumb or somehow untalanted. It's because they have a very different gamer culture there, at least in lower MMR territory russians will often be playing drunk with their friends, doing it as casual background entertainment while talking and stuff. Which is fine by me, It's a game and you should play it the way you find entertaining, but this is partly to blame why sometimes russians play really weird in games. (That said, I've played with really good russian players in both LoL and Dota 2, so there's no doubt that this problem is vastly exaggerated.)
On October 21 2013 15:28 Tobberoth wrote: A few points:
* If a russian or brazilian do not know English, they should probably not play with the English filter. I don't demand that every single person in the world learn English, but I'm pretty fucking surprised when you refuse to learn English for some reason, yet feel entitled to play a teamgame with everyone who did. They have enough players playing in their languages and if the queues are so terrible, they can probably spend a few weeks learning the most common terms such as buy courier, missing mid etc.
Agreed, they should include some for of language ban, so people that keeps setting the wrong filters are banned for so.
* I don't know about brazilians, but there's a good reason why russians are often worse. It's not because russians are dumb or somehow untalanted. It's because they have a very different gamer culture there, at least in lower MMR territory russians will often be playing drunk with their friends, doing it as casual background entertainment while talking and stuff. Which is fine by me, It's a game and you should play it the way you find entertaining, but this is partly to blame why sometimes russians play really weird in games. (That said, I've played with really good russian players in both LoL and Dota 2, so there's no doubt that this problem is vastly exaggerated.)
I dont think that playing drunk is exclusive to russians. Beyond a certain hour everyone is drunk, be it vodka, tequila or cachaca lol.
On October 21 2013 15:54 ishida66 wrote: I dont think that playing drunk is exclusive to russians. Beyond a certain hour everyone is drunk, be it vodka, tequila or cachaca lol.
At least in Sweden, it's almost considered disfunctional to be drinking when you're by the computer. You go out and drink with friends, sitting at home alone drinking is borderline alcoholic level of sad. I would assume that the vast majority of Swedish players who play drunk do so either because they are playing during a party, or after a party before going to bed. At least, that's how it works in southern sweden, might be more drunkyness up north.
On October 21 2013 11:48 DannyJ wrote: When I join a game and 2+ people cant or refuse to speak english (which is like at least half of my games on USeast) I think "Great I can't communicate" not "great they suck". I don't understand why people voluntarily join servers where the odds are the other people can't speak your language. It's really just a total detriment to such a team based game as DOTA.
Pretty much all that needs to be said.
Also, what a timely way to involve yourself in the TL community. Create an account on TL, make a controversial blog and plug your links at the bottom so you gain more traffic from it.
On October 21 2013 15:54 ishida66 wrote: I dont think that playing drunk is exclusive to russians. Beyond a certain hour everyone is drunk, be it vodka, tequila or cachaca lol.
At least in Sweden, it's almost considered disfunctional to be drinking when you're by the computer. You go out and drink with friends, sitting at home alone drinking is borderline alcoholic level of sad. I would assume that the vast majority of Swedish players who play drunk do so either because they are playing during a party, or after a party before going to bed. At least, that's how it works in southern sweden, might be more drunkyness up north.
After party playing drunk does still count as being drunk though . I used to play after parties a lot, most with axe + counter helix.
it's almost considered disfunctional to be drinking when you're by the computer. sitting at home alone drinking is borderline alcoholic level of sad
i learned that "axaxaxaxa" is russian for "hahaha"
lots of shit learned from this game, like united nations stuff really. cyka, cibai (cb), sohai, zzz etc..
yeah this might be true but then chinese are chinesely good, about 80% of the time, when I see chinese chars for names, I heed and take caution if they are on the other team and when they are in my team? i just #yolo random time.
Your points about probabiliies and how we falsly perceive the russians/brazilians are worse than others is right. Also your point about these countries being so big that they are kinda isolated and don't need to speak other languages is right.
At the end of the day your whole blogpost becomes bullshit because of the language option that Valve gave us. Sure let the Russians play on any server they like but to intentionally pick English language setting and then refuse to speak a single word of English and instead speak Russian which has its own language setting is not excusable. It is not.
The take-away from all of this is that Dota is an excercise in patience. There was never a point in hating on demographics because of aforementioned sample-size principle, but it's so widespread now that a lot of players probably even do it subconciously. They should just focus on their own game instead. If they manage to get better theyll escape most of the "tards" or what you want ot call them ^^ Because there's still definately a coherence between lack of skill and use of chat to bm. What I'm saying is that people let it get to them too much.
I hear many of you stating "Russians are incredibly BM and ruin games" while also asking "Why do Russians queue on server X instead of their own?"
The original statement is the answer. My best friend frequently travels to Ukraine for work and has many Ukrainian friends. They explain it like this. If you think one Russian ruins a game imagine being in a game with 9 Russians. How do you think it will turn out? Forcing polite Russians or Ukrainians to queue up with only Russians is basically a human rights violation. They have a right to escape their incredibly BM servers. Ideally just the polite ones would queue up in Western Europe and NA, but that is not how it is.
Some of our friends who live in Ukraine are happy to tolerate 110 ping to NA East just to avoid the incredible BM that goes on in the Russian Servers, although they prefer Western Europe.
I am brazilian and I only queue in South America's server and... guess what? We get A LOT of americans, too! And.. guess what? Most of them suck, too! And yes, I do speak english. And yes, I do queue for portuguese speakers only.
But... WHO CARES! I am playing Dota2 in a South American server. I will get brazilians, peruvians, argentinians, chileans, uruguaians, americans, puerto ricans, canadians, mexicans,..! If you play in US-East or US-West, you will probably get most of the same guys, you know why? Because you can triple queue and Dota2 matchmaking queue takes about 4 minutes to find a game! Goku help you if you are in low priority...
I've managed to win most of the time I got a "foreigner" that didnt speak portuguese. Do you know why? Because I made an effort to speak english, spanish or french (once). Heck! I even got one korean once... he was saying something like "gong gong!!" and I managed to realize that he wanted me to attack after a few times and this scored us several kills!
And, yeah, brazilians usually do get a bad rep on online games, but the reason is far from what you think. Those reasons happen mostly because of preconceptions that came from a single game (I think it was LineAge2, not sure) that had a "brazilian gang" of trolls, but it ended up spreading as "brazilians are bad at MMOs", then to "brazilians are bad at games and stupid". I am a moderately good player (sp. for my level) and I've never met an american that could play better than me when queueing. Does this means all americans suck at the game? Come on!
This is a huge pile of bulls.... Honestly, the only thing I agree with is that of course there should no racism and it shouldn't be tolerated but the whole argumentation in this blog is about the worst I've ever heard.
I understand for English people that it's a huge no-no to expect other people to speak your language, but wake up. English is sort of the "global" language and is one of the most useful (just to not say it's a necessity) tools you will ever learn in this globalized world. You will encounter a lot of problems in life if you aren't able to speak English; some places more than others. Comparing English to French, German or Swiss (or whatever language you want to put in here) is just out right retarded. Those languages have nowhere near the same status in our globalized society, and is not the language for our almost all entertainment, media and what not in the world. I do accept people not being able to speak English, that's up to them and it's fine.
However, the thing I dislike the most is the fact that you're actually saying being unable to communicate in a team is totally fine. It's NOT fine. I want to be able to play a team game, where to me the most vital part of it is communication, where I can go in and have fun, enjoy the atmosphere and learn something. Whenever you're forced to play with people who do not speak English, you can't communicate properly and that just removes the most important factor of playing as a team. Why am I not allowed to queue into this? I do not understand. I do realize that it's hard if not impossible to develop a tool that's perfect and will allow me to do this, but posting blogs like this really just doesn't make any kind of sense because it's not true.
On top of that, it's not about where the server is located -- which I have no idea why you thought that was relevant -- but about what it's labelled and who you expect to be playing on it. It's not a Luxemborg server, it's an EU West server that is located in Luxemborg because that makes it best ping wise for the western region of Europe and Valve had the option to set this up. As far as I am aware, the Russian server is also located in Stockholm but this does not make it a Swedish server. Anyway, enough for now I am sure you get my point.
Racism needs to get the hell out of our community though.
Disrespectful and dismissive. Honestly, I'd agree with points regarding racism, but the way you went about it, ignoring the main issue (*Selecting a language and then not being able to find games where people speak using that language*) and insulting the readers repeatedly using what mostly are straw man arguments, as most of us don't actually believe nation X is all born with downs ... Not my cup of tea. Not the hero we need, but the hero we deserve I guess. I'll just hope that it does good even though I'm sad you couldn't go about it the intellectual way.
PS. Re-read the third paragraph of Bumblebee's post above me please. That's the main issue with this article, and it's even bigger than the stylistic issue.
Honestly a really poor read, a few counter points to a wrongful idiot pointing fingers at wrongful idiots
Stop getting hung up on the "English thing" It is about playing with people I can communicate with.
Every other game I play I can always make sure I play with people I can communicate with other wise what is the point, the "cant we just all get along.." really must be a different world from the one I live in and the internet amplifies it ten fold, I'm not interested in a United Nations of Dota it's just a foolish notion.
I don't mind where in the world you are form as long as I can communicate with you I am happy, but as I only speak English if you don't then I don't want to play with you full stop.
Again it's why I watch English speaking TV, listen to English speaking radio, read English News papers and visit only English language websites because I can understand what is going on , how hard is that to understand !.
Another person missing the point, so when you listened to casts of games do you listen in a language you don't understand , why didn't we have multilingual casters and panel members like Bruno speaking different languages at TI3 because it would have been stupid.
What is really funny is he posted on a website which only allows English as a language option?(anything else is a ban hammer), and how many languages is pyrion flax announcer available , hypocrite maybe.
On October 22 2013 03:18 Bumblebee wrote: I understand for English people that it's a huge no-no to expect other people to speak your language, but wake up. English is sort of the "global" language and is one of the most useful (just to not say it's a necessity) tools you will ever learn in this globalized world. You will encounter a lot of problems in life if you aren't able to speak English; some places more than others. Comparing English to French, German or Swiss (or whatever language you want to put in here) is just out right retarded. Those languages have nowhere near the same status in our globalized society, and is not the language for our almost all entertainment, media and what not in the world. I do accept people not being able to speak English, that's up to them and it's fine.
This is a very US- and Western Europe- centric point of view.
For many people who happen to live in any of the ex-USSR countries, English is pretty useless unless you need it specifically for international communication (working in an international company or something like that). If you don't speak the local language (say, Ukrainian or Georgian) chances are that English will get you nowhere, while many people will be able to speak Russian. Even in Poland, which is a part of the EU, I had a hard time communicating in English, and it was often easier to communicate in Russian.
I am sure I don't need to point you at the map to see how huge that territory is.
Now add China, where very few people actually speak English, and India, where only 10% of the population speak English, and Korea, and Japan, and Indonesia... and suddenly English is not as global as you would like to think.
Yes, it definitely is the most widely used international language. It is also very convenient to use English as the 'default' international language across European countries. But within China or CIS, there is absolutely no need to learn English.
Within Dota context, if you look at the stream viewers count, Russian language streams are at least on par with English streams with respect to viewer count, and during the last Starladder finals, which was the most viewed tournament to date outside of The International, there were 150K viewers on the Russian stream and 80K on the English one. I think this can be easily translated to mean that there are as many Russian-speaking players as there are English-speaking players in the Dota community, and more likely the majority of Dota players outside China are Russian speakers.
Now please tell me, if Dota community is not dominated by English speakers, how come when there is a problem in communication it is blamed on people not willing to speak English rather than the other way around?
The communication problem is also not necessarily a language problem most of the time. I am sure that most people who refuse to talk to you in English are in fact able to, only they choose not to. Even if you make the language filter stricter somehow, how do you filter out people simply refusing to communicate?
On October 22 2013 03:18 Bumblebee wrote: I understand for English people that it's a huge no-no to expect other people to speak your language, but wake up. English is sort of the "global" language and is one of the most useful (just to not say it's a necessity) tools you will ever learn in this globalized world. You will encounter a lot of problems in life if you aren't able to speak English; some places more than others. Comparing English to French, German or Swiss (or whatever language you want to put in here) is just out right retarded. Those languages have nowhere near the same status in our globalized society, and is not the language for our almost all entertainment, media and what not in the world. I do accept people not being able to speak English, that's up to them and it's fine.
This is a very US- and Western Europe- centric point of view.
For many people who happen to live in any of the ex-USSR countries, English is pretty useless unless you need it specifically for international communication (working in an international company or something like that). If you don't speak the local language (say, Ukrainian or Georgian) chances are that English will get you nowhere, while many people will be able to speak Russian. Even in Poland, which is a part of the EU, I had a hard time communicating in English, and it was often easier to communicate in Russian.
I am sure I don't need to point you at the map to see how huge that territory is.
Now add China, where very few people actually speak English, and India, where only 10% of the population speak English, and Korea, and Japan, and Indonesia... and suddenly English is not as global as you would like to think.
Yes, it definitely is the most widely used international language. It is also very convenient to use English as the 'default' international language across European countries. But within China or CIS, there is absolutely no need to learn English.
Within Dota context, if you look at the stream viewers count, Russian language streams are at least on par with English streams with respect to viewer count, and during the last Starladder finals, which was the most viewed tournament to date outside of The International, there were 150K viewers on the Russian stream and 80K on the English one. I think this can be easily translated to mean that there are as many Russian-speaking players as there are English-speaking players in the Dota community, and more likely the majority of Dota players outside China are Russian speakers.
Now please tell me, if Dota community is not dominated by English speakers, how come when there is a problem in communication it is blamed on people not willing to speak English rather than the other way around?
Don't get hung up on the "English thing" it is a red herring , Dota 2 MM needs some method of allowing players with the same language skills to be able to play together, the problems are as follow
1. Not enough language options. 2. Players selecting language options they can't speak. 3. Zero proper region Settings, allowing players from half the world away to connect to certain regions is problematic. 4. Dota 2 is game it is meant to be fun and enjoyable, I don't get that if I cant understand other players in my team.
This Blog is rubbish and poorly thought out, It just adds to the problems and the replies to it highlight that very point.
On October 22 2013 03:18 Bumblebee wrote: I understand for English people that it's a huge no-no to expect other people to speak your language, but wake up. English is sort of the "global" language and is one of the most useful (just to not say it's a necessity) tools you will ever learn in this globalized world. You will encounter a lot of problems in life if you aren't able to speak English; some places more than others. Comparing English to French, German or Swiss (or whatever language you want to put in here) is just out right retarded. Those languages have nowhere near the same status in our globalized society, and is not the language for our almost all entertainment, media and what not in the world. I do accept people not being able to speak English, that's up to them and it's fine.
This is a very US- and Western Europe- centric point of view.
For many people who happen to live in any of the ex-USSR countries, English is pretty useless unless you need it specifically for international communication (working in an international company or something like that). If you don't speak the local language (say, Ukrainian or Georgian) chances are that English will get you nowhere, while many people will be able to speak Russian. Even in Poland, which is a part of the EU, I had a hard time communicating in English, and it was often easier to communicate in Russian.
I am sure I don't need to point you at the map to see how huge that territory is.
Now add China, where very few people actually speak English, and India, where only 10% of the population speak English, and Korea, and Japan, and Indonesia... and suddenly English is not as global as you would like to think.
Yes, it definitely is the most widely used international language. It is also very convenient to use English as the 'default' international language across European countries. But within China or CIS, there is absolutely no need to learn English.
Within Dota context, if you look at the stream viewers count, Russian language streams are at least on par with English streams with respect to viewer count, and during the last Starladder finals, which was the most viewed tournament to date outside of The International, there were 150K viewers on the Russian stream and 80K on the English one. I think this can be easily translated to mean that there are as many Russian-speaking players as there are English-speaking players in the Dota community, and more likely the majority of Dota players outside China are Russian speakers.
Now please tell me, if Dota community is not dominated by English speakers, how come when there is a problem in communication it is blamed on people not willing to speak English rather than the other way around?
The communication problem is also not necessarily a language problem most of the time. I am sure that most people who refuse to talk to you in English are in fact able to, only they choose not to. Even if you make the language filter stricter somehow, how do you filter out people simply refusing to communicate?
You're cherry picking your arguments here and ignoring the real issue.
Not being able to speak English is perfectly fine. Queuing with English set as a language when you can't or won't speak English is making the game experience worse for everyone.
The reverse is equally true. I only speak English and if I queued with the Russian language set I'd be a total asshole.
On October 22 2013 07:47 [TGU]SOL wrote: Don't get hung up on the "English thing" it is a red herring , Dota 2 MM needs some method of allowing players with the same language skills to be able to play together, the problems are as follow
1. Not enough language options. 2. Players selecting language options they can't speak. 3. Zero proper region Settings, allowing players from half the world away to connect to certain regions is problematic. 4. Dota 2 is game it is meant to be fun and enjoyable, I don't get that if I cant understand other players in my team.
This Blog is rubbish and poorly thought out, It just adds to the problems and the replies to it highlight that very point.
Well, my opinion is that the problem is not that much about languages, it is more about people being assholes and refusing to communicate. It is not as clear cut as choosing what language you agree to speak. For example, if someone does speak English, but they get matched with two other people who share another (native) language with them, can you really blame them for talking to each other in their language even if the other two do not understand it? It is bad mannered, but it is natural and I am sure that it is what happens most of the time. Most importantly there is no good way to regulate that.
Well, my opinion is that the problem is not that much about languages, it is more about people being assholes and refusing to communicate. It is not as clear cut as choosing what language you agree to speak. For example, if someone does speak English, but they get matched with two other people who share another (native) language with them, can you really blame them for talking to each other in their language even if the other two do not understand it? It is bad mannered, but it is natural and I am sure that it is what happens most of the time. Most importantly there is no good way to regulate that.
Yes I can blame them, just like this forum you agree to use a certain language when you sign up ( try using another to see what happens) just like selecting a language in game.
Don't agree or select something you are not willing to participate in. the issue is those players should just select their native language , I agree the poor language options in Dota 2 sometimes means this is not possible, but that is an issue for Valve to deal with and do some thing about which Mr Flax didn't have the balls to say.
I have to add my voice to the chorus of opposition, this blog was mostly just insulting and dismissive and didn't add anything of substance to the debate except for a degrading brand of comedy. Dota 2 is clearly a team game, communication tends to be important in team games. When people queue up to play a game with the wrong language filter, it messes up the game.
It really is that simple. I don't understand how people get the idea that language is irrelevant in a team game that relies on coordinated attacks and spotting. It clearly makes things more difficult and frustrating. How some people assume that this is equivalent to xenophobia is frankly kind of dumb, and also pretty insulting to a lot of people.
On October 22 2013 03:18 Bumblebee wrote: I understand for English people that it's a huge no-no to expect other people to speak your language, but wake up. English is sort of the "global" language and is one of the most useful (just to not say it's a necessity) tools you will ever learn in this globalized world. You will encounter a lot of problems in life if you aren't able to speak English; some places more than others. Comparing English to French, German or Swiss (or whatever language you want to put in here) is just out right retarded. Those languages have nowhere near the same status in our globalized society, and is not the language for our almost all entertainment, media and what not in the world. I do accept people not being able to speak English, that's up to them and it's fine.
This is a very US- and Western Europe- centric point of view.
For many people who happen to live in any of the ex-USSR countries, English is pretty useless unless you need it specifically for international communication (working in an international company or something like that). If you don't speak the local language (say, Ukrainian or Georgian) chances are that English will get you nowhere, while many people will be able to speak Russian. Even in Poland, which is a part of the EU, I had a hard time communicating in English, and it was often easier to communicate in Russian.
I am sure I don't need to point you at the map to see how huge that territory is.
Now add China, where very few people actually speak English, and India, where only 10% of the population speak English, and Korea, and Japan, and Indonesia... and suddenly English is not as global as you would like to think.
Yes, it definitely is the most widely used international language. It is also very convenient to use English as the 'default' international language across European countries. But within China or CIS, there is absolutely no need to learn English.
Within Dota context, if you look at the stream viewers count, Russian language streams are at least on par with English streams with respect to viewer count, and during the last Starladder finals, which was the most viewed tournament to date outside of The International, there were 150K viewers on the Russian stream and 80K on the English one. I think this can be easily translated to mean that there are as many Russian-speaking players as there are English-speaking players in the Dota community, and more likely the majority of Dota players outside China are Russian speakers.
Now please tell me, if Dota community is not dominated by English speakers, how come when there is a problem in communication it is blamed on people not willing to speak English rather than the other way around?
The communication problem is also not necessarily a language problem most of the time. I am sure that most people who refuse to talk to you in English are in fact able to, only they choose not to. Even if you make the language filter stricter somehow, how do you filter out people simply refusing to communicate?
Im not from Dota, but i want to nitpick on the Polish part. It is true that several years ago Russian was primary foreign language here. It was extremely "popular" (before we became democratic) during the times when my parents where still learning. But nowadays? No chance in hell, everyone look up on US, children start learning English since kindergarten/primary school. Russian became archaic and viewed as the past. It is maybe still prevelent because of it's history but it is pushed back in a very quick manner since several years.
On October 22 2013 07:36 Random() wrote: Now add China, where very few people actually speak English, and India, where only 10% of the population speak English, and Korea, and Japan, and Indonesia... and suddenly English is not as global as you would like to think.
You can survive years in Korea and Japan with only English. Same in China. Is the population weak in English compared to most western european countries? Sure, but there's just no language that is even close. These people, at least Japanese and Koreans, ALL study English for many many years, and in the younger generation, I'd be surprised if they are so bad at English that they can't even communicate in Dota. Hell, they study English more in school in Korea than we do in Sweden, the reason we are better at it in general is simply because of Swedish also being a north germanic language and English culture being prevalent here (movies, music, tv shows, internet use).
There simply isn't much of an excuse. "They don't need to know English in their country". They obviously do if they set English as their language in Dota. What they do outside of that situation is up to them.
On October 22 2013 03:18 Bumblebee wrote: I understand for English people that it's a huge no-no to expect other people to speak your language, but wake up. English is sort of the "global" language and is one of the most useful (just to not say it's a necessity) tools you will ever learn in this globalized world. You will encounter a lot of problems in life if you aren't able to speak English; some places more than others. Comparing English to French, German or Swiss (or whatever language you want to put in here) is just out right retarded. Those languages have nowhere near the same status in our globalized society, and is not the language for our almost all entertainment, media and what not in the world. I do accept people not being able to speak English, that's up to them and it's fine.
None of this is true. Spanish and French are far more popular as second languages. Though this is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
The issue with "foreign" players isn't the languages they speak. The issue is intentionally playing on servers where they can't communicate when there are better options available.
On October 22 2013 03:18 Bumblebee wrote: I understand for English people that it's a huge no-no to expect other people to speak your language, but wake up. English is sort of the "global" language and is one of the most useful (just to not say it's a necessity) tools you will ever learn in this globalized world. You will encounter a lot of problems in life if you aren't able to speak English; some places more than others. Comparing English to French, German or Swiss (or whatever language you want to put in here) is just out right retarded. Those languages have nowhere near the same status in our globalized society, and is not the language for our almost all entertainment, media and what not in the world. I do accept people not being able to speak English, that's up to them and it's fine.
None of this is true. Spanish and French are far more popular as second languages. Though this is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
The issue with "foreign" players isn't the languages they speak. The issue is intentionally playing on servers where they can't communicate when there are better options available.
Spanish at 60 mil L2 speakers, English at 430 mil. Not even close, and French is FAR behind that.
That is a terribly inaccurate article. There are 2 estimates on that page for English as a second language one is 430 mil and the other is 150 mil. It lists the native speakers or French being 68.5 mil and 75 mil. The population of France alone is 65 million, and that doesn't take any of the former colonies into account which are still primarily French speaking to this day.
I could quote any number of articles that are as a wildly inaccurate as that page to support my argument but it would be pointless.
Spanish at 60 mil L2 speakers, English at 430 mil. Not even close, and French is FAR behind that.
That is a terribly inaccurate article. There are 2 estimates on that page for English as a second language one is 430 mil and the other is 150 mil. It lists the native speakers or French being 68.5 mil and 75 mil. The population of France alone is 65 million, and that doesn't take any of the former colonies into account which are still primarily French speaking to this day.
I could quote any number of articles that are as a wildly inaccurate as that page to support my argument but it would be pointless.
Posting an "inaccurate" source beats having no source any day. So no, it's not pointless. And I doubt you're going to find a more reliable acceptable source than ethnologue anyway, which counts French as being spoken in 51 countries yet still only puts it at 68.5 mil first language speakers.
Ethnologue used the 2006 census for France, at which time they had a population of about 55 mil. Obviously there's more now, but that's true for all countries.
On October 22 2013 03:18 Bumblebee wrote: I understand for English people that it's a huge no-no to expect other people to speak your language, but wake up. English is sort of the "global" language and is one of the most useful (just to not say it's a necessity) tools you will ever learn in this globalized world. You will encounter a lot of problems in life if you aren't able to speak English; some places more than others. Comparing English to French, German or Swiss (or whatever language you want to put in here) is just out right retarded. Those languages have nowhere near the same status in our globalized society, and is not the language for our almost all entertainment, media and what not in the world. I do accept people not being able to speak English, that's up to them and it's fine.
None of this is true. Spanish and French are far more popular as second languages. Though this is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
The issue with "foreign" players isn't the languages they speak. The issue is intentionally playing on servers where they can't communicate when there are better options available.
On October 22 2013 20:26 Rezudox wrote: I'm willing to concede my estimates may have been off. But I still fail to see what that has to do with the topic.
You clearly didn't read what he said. He's saying people expecting English as it would be the same as to expect people speaking Spanish, Swiss, French and alike which is just absurd. It's probably an English thing, especially British, where they have some kind of mentality that they are not "allowed" to expect people to speak English.
You didn't talk about the part where there's an option to queue in the Russian language but people who speak no English choose to queue English anyway. I understand for Brazilians there's no Portuguese queue option and I've never gotten angry at a Brazilian for language. Russians, however, do have a language queue for themselves.
On October 22 2013 21:08 Bumblebee wrote: You clearly didn't read what he said. He's saying people expecting English as it would be the same as to expect people speaking Spanish, Swiss, French and alike which is just absurd. It's probably an English thing, especially British, where they have some kind of mentality that they are not "allowed" to expect people to speak English.
I honestly don't understand what you just said. Not trolling.
On October 22 2013 21:08 Bumblebee wrote: You clearly didn't read what he said. He's saying people expecting English as it would be the same as to expect people speaking Spanish, Swiss, French and alike which is just absurd. It's probably an English thing, especially British, where they have some kind of mentality that they are not "allowed" to expect people to speak English.
I honestly don't understand what you just said. Not trolling.
He's saying that we should expect people to know english in europe and usa when playing an online team game, and trying to compare it as the global language it is, with tiny, relatively, languages such as french, Swiss and Spanish is stupid.
On October 22 2013 21:08 Bumblebee wrote: You clearly didn't read what he said. He's saying people expecting English as it would be the same as to expect people speaking Spanish, Swiss, French and alike which is just absurd. It's probably an English thing, especially British, where they have some kind of mentality that they are not "allowed" to expect people to speak English.
I honestly don't understand what you just said. Not trolling.
He's saying that we should expect people to know english in europe and usa when playing an online team game, and trying to compare it as the global language it is, with tiny, relatively, languages such as french, Swiss and Spanish is stupid.
I'm not saying that we should expect people to know English. The rest is fine. I'm saying it's fair to want to play with people you are able to communicate with -- whether or not it's through English.
Fun fact: While looking around for sources on amount of L2 English speakers, I noticed that Ethnologues English page stated that there were only 1,5 mil L2 English speakers. Mailed them about it and they corrected the page, clearifying that the 1,5 mil mark is for UK alone. Awesomeness.
So lets see what this blog has achieved.(my last word on this silly blog)
1.Posted on a English only website complaining about people wanting English only games. 2.Fudges the issue of language selection by focusing on the " the English thing" 3.Fails to acknowledge the Developers Failure with MM, region and language filtering. 4.Producer of an Announcer pack only available in one language English asking others to put effort in where other language's are concerned. 5. Insults anyone who has a different point of view with thinly veiled accusation's of racism and xenophobia. 6. Incites discord among different language speakers just like MM does.
your sir are a knob and a shitlord buy your own measure, you have been complicit in inciting the very thing you where complaining about -10
On October 22 2013 23:25 Tobberoth wrote: Fun fact: While looking around for sources on amount of L2 English speakers, I noticed that Ethnologues English page stated that there were only 1,5 mil L2 English speakers. Mailed them about it and they corrected the page, clearifying that the 1,5 mil mark is for UK alone. Awesomeness.
What is even considered L2 English speakers in the UK? Immigrants?
On October 22 2013 23:17 Bumblebee wrote: I'm not saying that we should expect people to know English. The rest is fine. I'm saying it's fair to want to play with people you are able to communicate with -- whether or not it's through English.
I completely agree with you. As I said in my first post in this thread I can't understand why (in the case of europe) non-English speaking Russians queue on EU West English server. It makes no sense at all.
On October 22 2013 23:17 Bumblebee wrote: I'm not saying that we should expect people to know English. The rest is fine. I'm saying it's fair to want to play with people you are able to communicate with -- whether or not it's through English.
I completely agree with you. As I said in my first post in this thread I can't understand why (in the case of europe) non-English speaking Russians queue on EU West English server. It makes no sense at all.
Because their awesome friends who do speak English (and you therefore, never realize are from Russia), play EU West because they have friends who speak English only.
On October 22 2013 23:17 Bumblebee wrote: I'm not saying that we should expect people to know English. The rest is fine. I'm saying it's fair to want to play with people you are able to communicate with -- whether or not it's through English.
I completely agree with you. As I said in my first post in this thread I can't understand why (in the case of europe) non-English speaking Russians queue on EU West English server. It makes no sense at all.
Because their awesome friends who do speak English (and you therefore, never realize are from Russia), play EU West because they have friends who speak English only.
What does that have to do with the people who don't speak English?
On October 22 2013 23:17 Bumblebee wrote: I'm not saying that we should expect people to know English. The rest is fine. I'm saying it's fair to want to play with people you are able to communicate with -- whether or not it's through English.
I completely agree with you. As I said in my first post in this thread I can't understand why (in the case of europe) non-English speaking Russians queue on EU West English server. It makes no sense at all.
Because their awesome friends who do speak English (and you therefore, never realize are from Russia), play EU West because they have friends who speak English only.
What does that have to do with the people who don't speak English?
He's making the case that if 3 russians know english and play on english servers, 2 other russians who don't know English might play on English setting with the others. However, that case is weak for the following reasons:
1. This isn't Lol. The english speaking russians can easily just remove the english language setting when playing with the others. 2. If they the russians who do not know english are playing with english-speaking friends, there isn't much of a problem since the ones who do speak english can answer.
Wow, apparently disliking preventable communication barriers makes me a racist and a "shitlord". Hopefully this kind of sensationalist garbage doesn't continue to get featured, it worsens TL as a whole.
On October 23 2013 02:57 Lobotomist wrote: Wow, apparently disliking preventable communication barriers makes me a racist and a "shitlord". Hopefully this kind of sensationalist garbage doesn't continue to get featured, it worsens TL as a whole.
agreed, however the teamliquid dota community might want to expand their population base by trying to acquire fans and supporters of certain dota personalities through cross featuring. You can't really blame them for this. I don't mind their goal to "congregate" the fanbase like they did with Starcraft/SC2, but a better choice can definitely be made for spotlight in the future.
On October 23 2013 03:21 Hrwa wrote: Can't believe this is featured. Terrible style and terrible arguments.
Yeah, it's really godawful. The first thing that comes to mind is "Europeans could tell me to stick to my own server!" Well, that's fucking bullshit. The general language in any game in Europe is english. If you can't speak english, stick to your own fucking server. If you speak english, doesn't matter where you're from.
It's not ridiculous that people prefer a team game with people who speak the same language. People from the US have much less experience than europeans in dealing with different languages, far fewer Americans are multi-lingual. Team games require a lot of communication and if communication is impossible, your gameplay experience is worse. It may be xenophobic but it's just a reality, anyone who pretends to enjoy playing with Russians/Brazilians to not appear xenophobic or racist is only fooling themselves.
I don't hate people of other nationalities, I just hate their shitheads, just like I hate shits from the US and Canada. The problem is, if you are willing to cue on US East from half way across the fucking world, chances are you are inherently an asshole. This group of people misrepresents Brazilians and Russians. I wouldn't cue onto Russia or SE Asia because chances are the lag would be awful and I wouldn't be able to communicate with my teammates in a tremendously productive way. I just wouldn't want to ruin other people's experience by doing that.
I bet the other servers get all of our assholes who don't care about other people and cue on all servers (or at least they would if NA made up a larger percentage of the people who play dota.) I understand that this group of people doesn't represent an entire country, but that doesn't change the fact that they exist. It's completely possible that the vast majority of russians or brazilians who queue onto US East/West ARE in fact horrible obnoxious people.
I think it's amazingly stupid to be xenophobic, but it's also really stupid to claim that anybody that doesn't like dealing with being the odd man out of a Russian pre-made that feeds the entire game, steals your role and calls you a faggot for 45 minutes straight is a close minded lesser person. The anti-russian circle jerk can be insane sometimes, but this is article is just the other extreme. This article is basically just saying "Oh jeez, look how tolerant I am, aren't I the best? You guys should strive to be more like me." It doesn't really contribute anything of meaning and it doesn't talk about the actual issue.
Edit: Oh, there's so much ignorance in this thread that I should clarify. I'm not ironic, I think all the points are valid and the article overall is very witty (although being a math student, the statistics part might be a little simplified but I basically agree).
English might be the "global" language in the world today yes, but there's still way more people who don't speak english than there are people who do. Just because you yourself has bothered learning english as a second language, all you fellow swedes out there for example, doesn't justify you feeling intellectually superior to french or russian people who don't speak english. It's in no way a requirement in the modern world today to speak english. It's useful, sure, but in no way necessary.
Even if there's a problem with people selecting english as their language or whatever to get shorter queing times that's not an excuse for xenophobia and borderline racism. Complain to valve instead for having a dysfunctional match making system.
Excellent blog, but I was picturing you looking very sad and attempting to use a tin of food as a drum the entire time, which kind of distracted from your point. Timing could have been better, is all I'm saying.
On October 23 2013 08:38 PerryHooter wrote: This is brilliant.
Edit: Oh, there's so much ignorance in this thread that I should clarify. I'm not ironic, I think all the points are valid and the article overall is very witty (although being a math student, the statistics part might be a little simplified but I basically agree).
English might be the "global" language in the world today yes, but there's still way more people who don't speak english than there are people who do. Just because you yourself has bothered learning english as a second language, all you fellow swedes out there for example, doesn't justify you feeling intellectually superior to french or russian people who don't speak english. It's in no way a requirement in the modern world today to speak english. It's useful, sure, but in no way necessary.
Even if there's a problem with people selecting english as their language or whatever to get shorter queing times that's not an excuse for xenophobia and borderline racism. Complain to valve instead for having a dysfunctional match making system.
You're right in that if people are being xenophobic or racist then there are no excuses, but he's not pointing out instances where this occurs, he seems to be generalizing and labelling all people who have problems playing with other nationalities as cloaked xenophobes who follow the so-called "shit lords", which goes over the line. Particularly because as part of that group of problems, he includes disliking players who can't speak the same language.
All he states is that the rules of the game are the same so it shouldn't matter, but for a lot of players its important to be able to communicate clearly in the same language about what is going on, and since its a team-game with key timings involved, communication is particularly important for many players (see the numerous responses in this thread as evidence). If you read in this thread there are many examples of players who make no attempt to communicate even in some small part, instead ruining what should be a team effort by having a socially-focused chat in a foreign language like Brazilian interspersed with laughter. This blog doesn't make any attempt to counter that; all it offers is a non-sequitur that Brazilians don't really speak English because they're a big country...which in no way relates to the question of why they queue up to play in English-speaking games, therefore making it difficult to function as a team.
Obviously they probably do this to make it easier to join a game. But even if the match making system is dysfunctional, clearly the people who abuse that system are partially to blame and therefore engender some antagonism. You can't ignore that and say its *all* on Valve, and that people have no self-control or something like that. Note that this antagonism is not equivalent to racism or xenophobia; its the OP of this blog who is making this accusation and being as insulting as possible in general.
After all this I am genuinely curious as to what you find so brilliant in this blog, particularly as you are a math student so you should have a pretty rigorously trained mind in logical reasoning.
On October 23 2013 08:38 PerryHooter wrote: This is brilliant.
Edit: Oh, there's so much ignorance in this thread that I should clarify. I'm not ironic, I think all the points are valid and the article overall is very witty (although being a math student, the statistics part might be a little simplified but I basically agree).
English might be the "global" language in the world today yes, but there's still way more people who don't speak english than there are people who do. Just because you yourself has bothered learning english as a second language, all you fellow swedes out there for example, doesn't justify you feeling intellectually superior to french or russian people who don't speak english. It's in no way a requirement in the modern world today to speak english. It's useful, sure, but in no way necessary.
Even if there's a problem with people selecting english as their language or whatever to get shorter queing times that's not an excuse for xenophobia and borderline racism. Complain to valve instead for having a dysfunctional match making system.
How is it the fault of the matchmaking that people pick languages they don't understand, more so than the assholes picking the wrong languages?
I honestly don't understand how you can find this post brilliant. Trying to do something about xenophobia and racism is brilliant, this blog post isn't, especially since it gets its point across badly and offends anyone with legitimate concerns about people not being able to communicate. His post would have been brilliant if he wrote something along the lines of "There is racism brewing in Dota 2 because of the problems involving people who don't speak English queueing with English set as language. What can Valve do to remedy this, and what can we as a community do about this?". Instead, the post is just a general whine about people being annoyed when others ruin their fun, which is not brilliant in any way.
This is stupid article, in EU we got like 50 languages, and we all speak english, just RUSSIAN speak there language, and u get a team from 5 different language people, and everybody speak English, accept Russia dude speaks Russia, and hole team is telling him nobody understand him, but hi just doesn't give up, stupid RUSI***
maybe, just maybe people tick english only because they cannot understand english so they just tick all to make the queing faster - I myself did it before because I remembered before in beta you like have a good 5-10min wait. I ticked all SD, AR, least played etc, even russian and chinese. all I need are people who can understand a ping, wards, back and push. If they are good they can do that. If they have bad item choices well I dont care as long as if they are carry they get the most impt thing, mostly it is just BKB.
On October 23 2013 19:49 woreyour wrote: maybe, just maybe people tick english only because they cannot understand english so they just tick all to make the queing faster - I myself did it before because I remembered before in beta you like have a good 5-10min wait. I ticked all SD, AR, least played etc, even russian and chinese. all I need are people who can understand a ping, wards, back and push. If they are good they can do that. If they have bad item choices well I dont care as long as if they are carry they get the most impt thing, mostly it is just BKB.
Wait, you're saying they're ticking english because they can't understand english?
Queue times isn't a problem anymore. You're still an asshat for ticking a language you don't understand just so you don't have to wait 2 minutes for a game, which is the average queue time for me nowadays at least.
I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
2) Do we even know that the matchmaking will never match people with different language preferences? So how can you be so sure that all of the non-english speaking players have intentionally choosen a language they don't speak?
3) How can you distinguish between someone not wanting to communicate in english with you and someone not being able to speak english with you? Maybe they are just ignoring you.
4) Which amount of english do you need to speak in order to play Dota? Reading some of the comments I get the impression every pub game starts with a 20 minute planning session on how to set up the lanes followed by intense ingame discussion on tactical details. My pub games can be broken down to: push, defend, take rax, take rosh, stop feed and an appropriate ping.
Of course it would be preferable to speak the same language but people should realize that there are also some practical limitations here. And more importantly the article doesn't defend people intentionally not communicating. It just says that people should stop generalizing from a few bad apples to an entire group of people. And then it uses some pseudo-psychology and pseudo-math to explain why people tend to overly hate russians and brazilians. You can also summarize the whole thing to: "Let's all be nicer to each other."
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
2) Do we even know that the matchmaking will never match people with different language preferences? So how can you be so sure that all of the non-english speaking players have intentionally choosen a language they don't speak?
3) How can you distinguish between someone not wanting to communicate in english with you and someone not being able to speak english with you? Maybe they are just ignoring you.
4) Which amount of english do you need to speak in order to play Dota? Reading some of the comments I get the impression every pub game starts with a 20 minute planning session on how to set up the lanes followed by intense ingame discussion on tactical details. My pub games can be broken down to: push, defend, take rax, take rosh, stop feed and an appropriate ping.
Of course it would be preferable to speak the same language but people should realize that there are also some practical limitations here. And more importantly the article doesn't defend people intentionally not communicating. It just says that people should stop generalizing from a few bad apples to an entire group of people. And then it uses some pseudo-psychology and pseudo-math to explain why people tend to overly hate russians and brazilians. You can also summarize the whole thing to: "Let's all be nicer to each other."
1) How often do people run into others who can't speak English? Rarely, which is why Russians and Brazilians are named specifically, which is because they have a ton of players who don't speak English, and they play on servers people who mostly speak English play on. If you're Italian and don't speak English, fine, play with English people and simply don't try to communicate. The problem is when you get 2-3 russians in your team who speak Russian constantly (which is fine in itself) but can't communicate with the rest of the team at all.
2) No one is sure of that in any specific case. No doubt people do it though.
3) The problem is not so much when people don't respond, they might have just muted everyone. The problem is when they write in cyrillic as a response to english simple sentences. That said, people who ignore standard friendly communication are douchebags as well.
4) Pretty much exactly what your pub games can be broken down to is enough. If I write "Don't cross river alone, you're feeding them." I would love it if they at least actually understand what I write, whether or not they act on it.
Really bad article, looks like some raging at people who rage at Brazilians and Russians. The article has no point and actually has no basis since it's impossible to determine the % of bad players in any country. Actually it's quite justified to be unhappy about people not talking in english, since it's the global gaming language and the majority of players know it well enough to establish at least basic communication in game. So when someone comes in, feeds and spams some random language you expect people to just forget it? I don't know how it works in Dota, but in MMO games the rules you need to sign at the start state that the official language of the servers (or specifically marked servers) is english and not using it in public chats can be reported, but someone would have to tell me if there is a thing like that in Dota.
I'm baffled why would anyone put this article as featured.
I agreed with parts of it but after spending a few hundred bucks on Dota and helping Valve with their beta for several years I don't really think it's fair to call me xenophobic for wanting a match making system that places me with four people speaking English when I click "US East - English". Unlike Pyrion I don't live anywhere near a country where English isn't taught in schools, and I do not queue on 3 different regions. For the entire existence of US East - English I have been clicking only US - East English and still am quite often met with people who refuse to communicate in English, can't communicate in English or call me a fat American pig for speaking English on the US - East English servers paid for by American English speaking company Valve, who I have contributed a lot of dollars to.
Please don't confuse a customer wanting to play a competitive strategic video game with an open and coherent line of communication as being anything remotely tied into racism. Yes this is what some memes on the internet say, yes I know people on Valve's facebook wall simply reduce my argument to "no brazilians and no russians in my life!!!" and make the whole movement look stupid and racist, but I assure you I've met plenty of people who just want coherent Dota. This isn't Counter-Strike and it's hard to have fun or win if someone speaks only a language I don't. The same is true for everyone who gets hammered, match making is horrible but the one defense I will make for it is that no game that I know of can take your blood alcohol level and adjust your match making queue accordingly.
On October 24 2013 00:22 Oakenshield wrote: I agreed with parts of it but after spending a few hundred bucks on Dota and helping Valve with their beta for several years I don't really think it's fair to call me xenophobic for wanting a match making system that places me with four people speaking English when I click "US East - English". Unlike Pyrion I don't live anywhere near a country where English isn't taught in schools, and I do not queue on 3 different regions. For the entire existence of US East - English I have been clicking only US - East English and still am quite often met with people who refuse to communicate in English, can't communicate in English or call me a fat American pig for speaking English on the US - East English servers paid for by American English speaking company Valve, who I have contributed a lot of dollars to.
Please don't confuse a customer wanting to play a competitive strategic video game with an open and coherent line of communication as being anything remotely tied into racism. Yes this is what some memes on the internet say, yes I know people on Valve's facebook wall simply reduce my argument to "no brazilians and no russians in my life!!!" and make the whole movement look stupid and racist, but I assure you I've met plenty of people who just want coherent Dota. This isn't Counter-Strike and it's hard to have fun or win if someone speaks only a language I don't. The same is true for everyone who gets hammered, match making is horrible but the one defense I will make for it is that no game that I know of can take your blood alcohol level and adjust your match making queue accordingly.
Approved by Swiss person.
Why not just queue the language(s) you can speak? It's that simple...
I don't understand the thought process of queuing "English", even though you can't say a single word except "noob". I don't queue Russian and go spam "cyka" either.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
You are making this post on a website that forbids you from posting in any other language than English. Reflect on that.
I hope you are able to reflect on the diference between engaging on a discussion and playing a game.
And I hope you are able to reflect on the need to communicate in a 5 man team game where every player is important and winning or losing depends on the synergy of the team.
Seriously, this was of posting is retarded. Trying to oneup someone by using their own sentences against them in a bad attempt at "getting them", when what you should be focusing on is the content of your post instead.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
2) Do we even know that the matchmaking will never match people with different language preferences? So how can you be so sure that all of the non-english speaking players have intentionally choosen a language they don't speak?
3) How can you distinguish between someone not wanting to communicate in english with you and someone not being able to speak english with you? Maybe they are just ignoring you.
4) Which amount of english do you need to speak in order to play Dota? Reading some of the comments I get the impression every pub game starts with a 20 minute planning session on how to set up the lanes followed by intense ingame discussion on tactical details. My pub games can be broken down to: push, defend, take rax, take rosh, stop feed and an appropriate ping.
Of course it would be preferable to speak the same language but people should realize that there are also some practical limitations here. And more importantly the article doesn't defend people intentionally not communicating. It just says that people should stop generalizing from a few bad apples to an entire group of people. And then it uses some pseudo-psychology and pseudo-math to explain why people tend to overly hate russians and brazilians. You can also summarize the whole thing to: "Let's all be nicer to each other."
1) How often do people run into others who can't speak English? Rarely, which is why Russians and Brazilians are named specifically, which is because they have a ton of players who don't speak English, and they play on servers people who mostly speak English play on. If you're Italian and don't speak English, fine, play with English people and simply don't try to communicate. The problem is when you get 2-3 russians in your team who speak Russian constantly (which is fine in itself) but can't communicate with the rest of the team at all.
2) No one is sure of that in any specific case. No doubt people do it though.
3) The problem is not so much when people don't respond, they might have just muted everyone. The problem is when they write in cyrillic as a response to english simple sentences. That said, people who ignore standard friendly communication are douchebags as well.
4) Pretty much exactly what your pub games can be broken down to is enough. If I write "Don't cross river alone, you're feeding them." I would love it if they at least actually understand what I write, whether or not they act on it.
1&2) That is what the blog is trying to point out. The problem arises because of the large numbers of russian and brazilian players, not because of their nationality. So if we can't be sure that the language option works and you have three russian players in your team, you might actually be in a situation where they have russian enabled and are wondering why you don't speak russian? And they are the majority in this example.
3&4) Sorry, but this does not make sense. You're basically saying that you don't know if they understand english but because they write in cyrillic you assume that they don't. And you also say that you don't care if they don't react to what you're writing as long as they confirm that they understand you. This is completely irrational. You're claiming that you're more upset with people that choose to ignore you than with people that are unable to understand you. And you confirmed earlier that we can't be sure if these people ended up in this situation on purpose. They might have simply been put there by a poor matchmaking algorithm.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
2) Do we even know that the matchmaking will never match people with different language preferences? So how can you be so sure that all of the non-english speaking players have intentionally choosen a language they don't speak?
3) How can you distinguish between someone not wanting to communicate in english with you and someone not being able to speak english with you? Maybe they are just ignoring you.
4) Which amount of english do you need to speak in order to play Dota? Reading some of the comments I get the impression every pub game starts with a 20 minute planning session on how to set up the lanes followed by intense ingame discussion on tactical details. My pub games can be broken down to: push, defend, take rax, take rosh, stop feed and an appropriate ping.
Of course it would be preferable to speak the same language but people should realize that there are also some practical limitations here. And more importantly the article doesn't defend people intentionally not communicating. It just says that people should stop generalizing from a few bad apples to an entire group of people. And then it uses some pseudo-psychology and pseudo-math to explain why people tend to overly hate russians and brazilians. You can also summarize the whole thing to: "Let's all be nicer to each other."
1) How often do people run into others who can't speak English? Rarely, which is why Russians and Brazilians are named specifically, which is because they have a ton of players who don't speak English, and they play on servers people who mostly speak English play on. If you're Italian and don't speak English, fine, play with English people and simply don't try to communicate. The problem is when you get 2-3 russians in your team who speak Russian constantly (which is fine in itself) but can't communicate with the rest of the team at all.
2) No one is sure of that in any specific case. No doubt people do it though.
3) The problem is not so much when people don't respond, they might have just muted everyone. The problem is when they write in cyrillic as a response to english simple sentences. That said, people who ignore standard friendly communication are douchebags as well.
4) Pretty much exactly what your pub games can be broken down to is enough. If I write "Don't cross river alone, you're feeding them." I would love it if they at least actually understand what I write, whether or not they act on it.
1&2) That is what the blog is trying to point out. The problem arises because of the large numbers of russian and brazilian players, not because of their nationality. So if we can't be sure that the language option works and you have three russian players in your team, you might actually be in a situation where they have russian enabled and are wondering why you don't speak russian? And they are the majority in this example.
3&4) Sorry, but this does not make sense. You're basically saying that you don't know if they understand english but because they write in cyrillic you assume that they don't. And you also say that you don't care if they don't react to what you're writing as long as they confirm that they understand you. This is completely irrational. You're claiming that you're more upset with people that choose to ignore you than with people that are unable to understand you. And you confirmed earlier that we can't be sure if these people ended up in this situation on purpose. They might have simply been put there by a poor matchmaking algorithm.
1&2) No, the blog is pointing out that people who get mad when they are matched with people who don't understand English even though they are queuing on mainly English speaking servers with English set, they are racists and xenophobes.
3&4) What's irrational about it? Valve can't do anything about people being assholes and ignoring communication, but they can do something about people who are unable to communicate. Trust me, I hate asshole trolling Swedes more than Russians who don't speak English, but that's a different problem altogether and not what the blog is about. I don't assume they don't speak English because they write Cyrillic, I assume they don't speak English if they refuse to respond or react to English WHILE speaking Cyrillic.
It's really simple: Valve just needs to make it so that you DON'T get matched with people who haven't enabled your language setting, which takes care of the uncertainty, then they need to enforce it. This could mess up matchmaking times a buttload, but it would be worth a try to silence the complainers and see how it goes.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
You are making this post on a website that forbids you from posting in any other language than English. Reflect on that.
Yes I have reflected on that and the main point is that Valve wants the maximum number of players. So they don't want to restrict the player pool to players with select language skills. It is advantageous if all players in a team speak the same language without a doubt. It is even better if all players speak the same first language (at least that is what Alliance is claiming), but that is even harder to achieve. What would even be better if the people know each other before starting the game and have already formed a five man team. I can go on, but the main point is that this not about what is ideal for a team but what Valve has choosen to implement.
You believe that sharing the same language to a certain degree is vital for this game and Valve obviously does not. So stop focussing your frustration on nationality X and start focussing it on Valve. I'm sure that if enough people petition for a language X only option, it will appear at some point. Up to that point people should stop bashing each other and make some arbitary declerations on what server belongs to what language. I'm pretty sure that first language german speakers are the majority in western europe. So maybe EU west should become german only? (Hint: sarcasm)
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
You are making this post on a website that forbids you from posting in any other language than English. Reflect on that.
I hope you are able to reflect on the diference between engaging on a discussion and playing a game.
And I hope you are able to reflect on the need to communicate in a 5 man team game where every player is important and winning or losing depends on the synergy of the team.
Seriously, this was of posting is retarded. Trying to oneup someone by using their own sentences against them in a bad attempt at "getting them", when what you should be focusing on is the content of your post instead.
Are you actually saying Dota 2 should be restricted from everyone that doesn't speak the listed languages? And untill recently from anyone that didn't speak Russian, English or Chinese? That's a pretty absurd way of thinking.
There's a very big diference between choosing the right language and forbidding a vast number of people from playing the game.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
You are making this post on a website that forbids you from posting in any other language than English. Reflect on that.
I hope you are able to reflect on the diference between engaging on a discussion and playing a game.
And I hope you are able to reflect on the need to communicate in a 5 man team game where every player is important and winning or losing depends on the synergy of the team.
Seriously, this was of posting is retarded. Trying to oneup someone by using their own sentences against them in a bad attempt at "getting them", when what you should be focusing on is the content of your post instead.
Are you actually saying Dota 2 should be restricted from everyone that doesn't speak the listed languages? And untill recently from anyone that didn't speak Russian, English or Chinese? That's a pretty absurd way of thinking.
There's a very big diference between choosing the right language and forbidding a vast number of people from playing the game.
No one has been saying anything of the sort. I've never lashed out against any country who doesn't have english as first or second language and doesn't have their own server or anything that is closer to them than the main english servers are.
Russians on the other hand have both english in their education system and their own server. Yet a lot of them they outright refuse to communicate in anything but their own language and they queue up the server where english is the main language. The few russians that does speak english tell me that they queue on the english server because they as well can't stand other russians. That really doesn't bode well for their community. If they can't tolerate themselves, why should we?
edit: This is just a personal theory, and I have no data to back it up at all. But I do think the gaming demographic in russia is a lot younger than the rest of mainland europe. And as we know, younger people tend to be..less mature. That would explain both why a lot of them behave the way they do, and why they're not comfortable speaking english. It also helps to understand why other more mature russians tend to dislike them as well. I don't have anything against minors at all. But when they turn into a majority in a community, that community tends to be become very immature and downright unapproachable by anyone else.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
You are making this post on a website that forbids you from posting in any other language than English. Reflect on that.
I hope you are able to reflect on the diference between engaging on a discussion and playing a game.
And I hope you are able to reflect on the need to communicate in a 5 man team game where every player is important and winning or losing depends on the synergy of the team.
Seriously, this was of posting is retarded. Trying to oneup someone by using their own sentences against them in a bad attempt at "getting them", when what you should be focusing on is the content of your post instead.
Are you actually saying Dota 2 should be restricted from everyone that doesn't speak the listed languages? And untill recently from anyone that didn't speak Russian, English or Chinese? That's a pretty absurd way of thinking.
There's a very big diference between choosing the right language and forbidding a vast number of people from playing the game.
No one has been saying anything of the sort. I've never lashed out against any country who doesn't have english as first or second language and doesn't have their own server or anything that is closer to them than the main english servers are.
Russians on the other hand have both english in their education system and their own server. Yet a lot of them they outright refuse to communicate in anything but their own language and they queue up the server where english is the main language. The few russians that does speak english tell me that they queue on the english server because they as well can't stand other russians. That really doesn't bode well for their community. If they can't tolerate themselves, why should we?
Noone has been saying anything of the sort? Read the nested quote. The guy I replied specifically quoted a case where there are no language options, and compared it to a discussion forum, where people that don't speak the language being discussed are obviously not allowed to participate.
You quoted me and started going on on a completelly diferent direction, when it is pretty clear if you look at the original quote it had nothing to do with russians. I didn't feel it was really necessary to go into detail on why forbidding certain demographics from playing the game is horrible. It's a pretty absurd concept and completelly unpractical.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
You are making this post on a website that forbids you from posting in any other language than English. Reflect on that.
I hope you are able to reflect on the diference between engaging on a discussion and playing a game.
And I hope you are able to reflect on the need to communicate in a 5 man team game where every player is important and winning or losing depends on the synergy of the team.
Seriously, this was of posting is retarded. Trying to oneup someone by using their own sentences against them in a bad attempt at "getting them", when what you should be focusing on is the content of your post instead.
Are you actually saying Dota 2 should be restricted from everyone that doesn't speak the listed languages? And untill recently from anyone that didn't speak Russian, English or Chinese? That's a pretty absurd way of thinking.
There's a very big diference between choosing the right language and forbidding a vast number of people from playing the game.
No one has been saying anything of the sort. I've never lashed out against any country who doesn't have english as first or second language and doesn't have their own server or anything that is closer to them than the main english servers are.
Russians on the other hand have both english in their education system and their own server. Yet a lot of them they outright refuse to communicate in anything but their own language and they queue up the server where english is the main language. The few russians that does speak english tell me that they queue on the english server because they as well can't stand other russians. That really doesn't bode well for their community. If they can't tolerate themselves, why should we?
Noone has been saying anything of the sort? Read the nested quote. The guy I replied specifically quoted a case where there are no language options, and compared it to a discussion forum, where people that don't speak the language being discussed are obviously not allowed to participate.
You quoted me and started going on on a completelly diferent direction, when it is pretty clear if you look at the original quote it had nothing to do with russians.
Hey, you accused me, and I spoke for me. I do not speak for anyone else on this forum. But I understand my wording could have been better in that regard. I quoted you earlier because your argument doesn't make any sense, while his (altough I personally disagree) does. I can completely see why "if there is no language settings for you, maybe the game isn't for you to begin with" as a valid argument (which is what was indirectly quoted), but yours saying "there is no comparison to a forum and a game", where both require communication, is not.
Personally I'd like to include as many people in dota 2 as possible, wherever they might be from. And if there is the odd man who doesn't speak english in my game once in a while, I don't mind. But a while demographic of people with their own server refusing to communicate in the language they queuing up for..?
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
You are making this post on a website that forbids you from posting in any other language than English. Reflect on that.
I hope you are able to reflect on the diference between engaging on a discussion and playing a game.
And I hope you are able to reflect on the need to communicate in a 5 man team game where every player is important and winning or losing depends on the synergy of the team.
Seriously, this was of posting is retarded. Trying to oneup someone by using their own sentences against them in a bad attempt at "getting them", when what you should be focusing on is the content of your post instead.
Are you actually saying Dota 2 should be restricted from everyone that doesn't speak the listed languages? And untill recently from anyone that didn't speak Russian, English or Chinese? That's a pretty absurd way of thinking.
There's a very big diference between choosing the right language and forbidding a vast number of people from playing the game.
No one has been saying anything of the sort. I've never lashed out against any country who doesn't have english as first or second language and doesn't have their own server or anything that is closer to them than the main english servers are.
Russians on the other hand have both english in their education system and their own server. Yet a lot of them they outright refuse to communicate in anything but their own language and they queue up the server where english is the main language. The few russians that does speak english tell me that they queue on the english server because they as well can't stand other russians. That really doesn't bode well for their community. If they can't tolerate themselves, why should we?
Noone has been saying anything of the sort? Read the nested quote. The guy I replied specifically quoted a case where there are no language options, and compared it to a discussion forum, where people that don't speak the language being discussed are obviously not allowed to participate.
You quoted me and started going on on a completelly diferent direction, when it is pretty clear if you look at the original quote it had nothing to do with russians.
Hey, you accused me, and I spoke for me. I do not speak for anyone else on this forum. But I understand my wording could have been better in that regard. I quoted you earlier because your argument doesn't make any sense, while his (altough I personally disagree) does. I can completely see why "if there is no language settings for you, maybe the game isn't for you to begin with" as a valid argument (which is what was indirectly quoted), but yours saying "there is no comparison to a forum and a game", where both require communication, is not.
Personally I'd like to include as many people in dota 2 as possible, wherever they might be from. And if there is the odd man who doesn't speak english in my game once in a while, I don't mind. But a while demographic of people with their own server refusing to communicate in the language they queuing up for..?
Games do not require communication. Specially not written communication. That's the key issue. Yes, it can obviously improve the experience, but it is no requirement, and it is not stated anywhere that you need to chat with your teammates. You are looking for a diferent word than "requirement".
A lot of people that talk in other language actually would be able to write their thoughts, at least in a very basic manner. They don't want to. It's not uncommon to see a group of friends talking all the time in chinese or whathever and still be able to write a little bit in english if they want to. People that queue in other servers don't want to talk to you. It doesn't matter what language they write. It doesn't matter what language they speak, if they don't want to listen to what people say, speaking english wouldn't change a damn thing, and this is why getting so worked up about this is silly.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
You are making this post on a website that forbids you from posting in any other language than English. Reflect on that.
I hope you are able to reflect on the diference between engaging on a discussion and playing a game.
And I hope you are able to reflect on the need to communicate in a 5 man team game where every player is important and winning or losing depends on the synergy of the team.
Seriously, this was of posting is retarded. Trying to oneup someone by using their own sentences against them in a bad attempt at "getting them", when what you should be focusing on is the content of your post instead.
Are you actually saying Dota 2 should be restricted from everyone that doesn't speak the listed languages? And untill recently from anyone that didn't speak Russian, English or Chinese? That's a pretty absurd way of thinking.
There's a very big diference between choosing the right language and forbidding a vast number of people from playing the game.
No one has been saying anything of the sort. I've never lashed out against any country who doesn't have english as first or second language and doesn't have their own server or anything that is closer to them than the main english servers are.
Russians on the other hand have both english in their education system and their own server. Yet a lot of them they outright refuse to communicate in anything but their own language and they queue up the server where english is the main language. The few russians that does speak english tell me that they queue on the english server because they as well can't stand other russians. That really doesn't bode well for their community. If they can't tolerate themselves, why should we?
Noone has been saying anything of the sort? Read the nested quote. The guy I replied specifically quoted a case where there are no language options, and compared it to a discussion forum, where people that don't speak the language being discussed are obviously not allowed to participate.
You quoted me and started going on on a completelly diferent direction, when it is pretty clear if you look at the original quote it had nothing to do with russians.
Hey, you accused me, and I spoke for me. I do not speak for anyone else on this forum. But I understand my wording could have been better in that regard. I quoted you earlier because your argument doesn't make any sense, while his (altough I personally disagree) does. I can completely see why "if there is no language settings for you, maybe the game isn't for you to begin with" as a valid argument (which is what was indirectly quoted), but yours saying "there is no comparison to a forum and a game", where both require communication, is not.
Personally I'd like to include as many people in dota 2 as possible, wherever they might be from. And if there is the odd man who doesn't speak english in my game once in a while, I don't mind. But a while demographic of people with their own server refusing to communicate in the language they queuing up for..?
Games do not require communication. Specially not written communication. That's the key issue. Yes, it can obviously improve the experience, but it is no requirement, and it is not stated anywhere that you need to chat with your teammates. You are looking for a diferent word than "requirement".
A lot of people that talk in other language actually would be able to write their thoughts, at least in a very basic manner. They don't want to. It's not uncommon to see a group of friends talking all the time in chinese or whathever and still be able to write a little bit in english if they want to. People that queue in other servers don't want to talk to you. It doesn't matter what language they write. It doesn't matter what language they speak, if they don't want to listen to what people say, speaking english wouldn't change a damn thing, and this is why getting so worked up about this is silly.
I can not fathom how you think a strategic game where victory depends on the synergy of you and your team does not require communication? Do you honestly think proteams don't communicate with eachother? Why should we in pubs require less communication than they do? This isn't a game where you can win by playing singleplayer. You can only win if you come together as a team, and that requires communication.
And yes, I use the word "require". If there is no communication, there is no strategy, and that team loses near always to a team that does communicate. This game is based around teamwork, stop trying to pass it off as a mere "bonus".
To your other points: If you want to talk to your friend in your own language, you do it on skype, ts, ventrilo or whatever. You don't shit up the in game voice chat. Humans get incredibly annoyed listening to conversations they can't understand, so why put your teammates through it? You can leave ingame chats to actually game-important stuff, while keeping the banter to yourselves.
edit: And you're saying "people who queue up on other servers don't want to talk to you", THEN DON'T QUE UP ON THE ENGLISH SERVER! que up on your own god damn server where you can talk in your own language as much as you want, and I can speak english to people who actually does want to talk in it.
whatever you might try to argue. If you have your own server with your own language, you do NOT get the right to queue up on any other server where you don't speak the language. Especially in a team focused game where communication is required. If you do, I get the right to report you and call you an asshat.
Another viable option, IMO, would be to have a "no-speaking" queue where there's no chat, just the ping commands. If you don't speak English, Russian or any of the other big languages, or if you simply don't want to be arsed with verbal communication, you can join that one and chat is disabled (or not, doesn't really matter). That way, there would be a perfectly fine way for people who don't want to or simply can't communicate, while allowing more enforcement on real communication in the normal queues.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
2) Do we even know that the matchmaking will never match people with different language preferences? So how can you be so sure that all of the non-english speaking players have intentionally choosen a language they don't speak?
3) How can you distinguish between someone not wanting to communicate in english with you and someone not being able to speak english with you? Maybe they are just ignoring you.
4) Which amount of english do you need to speak in order to play Dota? Reading some of the comments I get the impression every pub game starts with a 20 minute planning session on how to set up the lanes followed by intense ingame discussion on tactical details. My pub games can be broken down to: push, defend, take rax, take rosh, stop feed and an appropriate ping.
Of course it would be preferable to speak the same language but people should realize that there are also some practical limitations here. And more importantly the article doesn't defend people intentionally not communicating. It just says that people should stop generalizing from a few bad apples to an entire group of people. And then it uses some pseudo-psychology and pseudo-math to explain why people tend to overly hate russians and brazilians. You can also summarize the whole thing to: "Let's all be nicer to each other."
1) How often do people run into others who can't speak English? Rarely, which is why Russians and Brazilians are named specifically, which is because they have a ton of players who don't speak English, and they play on servers people who mostly speak English play on. If you're Italian and don't speak English, fine, play with English people and simply don't try to communicate. The problem is when you get 2-3 russians in your team who speak Russian constantly (which is fine in itself) but can't communicate with the rest of the team at all.
2) No one is sure of that in any specific case. No doubt people do it though.
3) The problem is not so much when people don't respond, they might have just muted everyone. The problem is when they write in cyrillic as a response to english simple sentences. That said, people who ignore standard friendly communication are douchebags as well.
4) Pretty much exactly what your pub games can be broken down to is enough. If I write "Don't cross river alone, you're feeding them." I would love it if they at least actually understand what I write, whether or not they act on it.
1&2) That is what the blog is trying to point out. The problem arises because of the large numbers of russian and brazilian players, not because of their nationality. So if we can't be sure that the language option works and you have three russian players in your team, you might actually be in a situation where they have russian enabled and are wondering why you don't speak russian? And they are the majority in this example.
3&4) Sorry, but this does not make sense. You're basically saying that you don't know if they understand english but because they write in cyrillic you assume that they don't. And you also say that you don't care if they don't react to what you're writing as long as they confirm that they understand you. This is completely irrational. You're claiming that you're more upset with people that choose to ignore you than with people that are unable to understand you. And you confirmed earlier that we can't be sure if these people ended up in this situation on purpose. They might have simply been put there by a poor matchmaking algorithm.
1&2) No, the blog is pointing out that people who get mad when they are matched with people who don't understand English even though they are queuing on mainly English speaking servers with English set, they are racists and xenophobes.
3&4) What's irrational about it? Valve can't do anything about people being assholes and ignoring communication, but they can do something about people who are unable to communicate. Trust me, I hate asshole trolling Swedes more than Russians who don't speak English, but that's a different problem altogether and not what the blog is about. I don't assume they don't speak English because they write Cyrillic, I assume they don't speak English if they refuse to respond or react to English WHILE speaking Cyrillic.
It's really simple: Valve just needs to make it so that you DON'T get matched with people who haven't enabled your language setting, which takes care of the uncertainty, then they need to enforce it. This could mess up matchmaking times a buttload, but it would be worth a try to silence the complainers and see how it goes.
1&2) I read the blog post differently. First of all it doesn't use the word racist anywhere. It talks about cloaked xenophobia in a very specific context. It adresses the problem of people going from "I met a lot of nationality-X assholes" to "Everyone of nationality X is an asshole". I think we can agree that this is bad and should be avoided.
3&4) But you can't distinguish people that refuse to communicate from people that can't communicate and that is why I'm saying you're being irrational. I do get the source of frustration but in every specific instance this has happened to you, you can never be sure that the people didn't simply refuse to communicate. Because in order to confirm this you need to communicate with them somehow.
Valve could do that, but it would marginalize part of the player base, specifically the players I mentioned in the beginning that speak none of the "option languages" and effectively put a language barrier into the game. These player will then simply ignore the function and enforcing could only be done by administring language test. So you don't really solve the problem, alienate part of the player base in the process, introduce a complicated to enforce game requirement and will most likely enrage the community even further.
Valve could just add a tick box option for every language they don't actually have to support those languages, just add them as a MM option, the real issue is players selecting languages they cant communicate in when there are language options they can.
Spin it how you like, you can try to be ironic and sarcastic like PF tried to do , but valve need to address it and those players selecting unsuitable language options just wont stop even if they have suitable language options and unlike PF I have the backbone to say so ,it's a game and not some peace movement for would be PC brigade members.
And don't lump it in with oh players of the same language can be abusive and uncommunicative ..etc etc that is a different issue.
On October 23 2013 20:49 BlueSpace wrote: I find the entire discussion regarding the matchmaking language preference option rather amusing.
1) So basically if I don't speak any of the languages given in the preference menu, I shouldn't be allowed to play Dota2 at all?
2) Do we even know that the matchmaking will never match people with different language preferences? So how can you be so sure that all of the non-english speaking players have intentionally choosen a language they don't speak?
3) How can you distinguish between someone not wanting to communicate in english with you and someone not being able to speak english with you? Maybe they are just ignoring you.
4) Which amount of english do you need to speak in order to play Dota? Reading some of the comments I get the impression every pub game starts with a 20 minute planning session on how to set up the lanes followed by intense ingame discussion on tactical details. My pub games can be broken down to: push, defend, take rax, take rosh, stop feed and an appropriate ping.
Of course it would be preferable to speak the same language but people should realize that there are also some practical limitations here. And more importantly the article doesn't defend people intentionally not communicating. It just says that people should stop generalizing from a few bad apples to an entire group of people. And then it uses some pseudo-psychology and pseudo-math to explain why people tend to overly hate russians and brazilians. You can also summarize the whole thing to: "Let's all be nicer to each other."
1) How often do people run into others who can't speak English? Rarely, which is why Russians and Brazilians are named specifically, which is because they have a ton of players who don't speak English, and they play on servers people who mostly speak English play on. If you're Italian and don't speak English, fine, play with English people and simply don't try to communicate. The problem is when you get 2-3 russians in your team who speak Russian constantly (which is fine in itself) but can't communicate with the rest of the team at all.
2) No one is sure of that in any specific case. No doubt people do it though.
3) The problem is not so much when people don't respond, they might have just muted everyone. The problem is when they write in cyrillic as a response to english simple sentences. That said, people who ignore standard friendly communication are douchebags as well.
4) Pretty much exactly what your pub games can be broken down to is enough. If I write "Don't cross river alone, you're feeding them." I would love it if they at least actually understand what I write, whether or not they act on it.
1&2) That is what the blog is trying to point out. The problem arises because of the large numbers of russian and brazilian players, not because of their nationality. So if we can't be sure that the language option works and you have three russian players in your team, you might actually be in a situation where they have russian enabled and are wondering why you don't speak russian? And they are the majority in this example.
3&4) Sorry, but this does not make sense. You're basically saying that you don't know if they understand english but because they write in cyrillic you assume that they don't. And you also say that you don't care if they don't react to what you're writing as long as they confirm that they understand you. This is completely irrational. You're claiming that you're more upset with people that choose to ignore you than with people that are unable to understand you. And you confirmed earlier that we can't be sure if these people ended up in this situation on purpose. They might have simply been put there by a poor matchmaking algorithm.
1&2) No, the blog is pointing out that people who get mad when they are matched with people who don't understand English even though they are queuing on mainly English speaking servers with English set, they are racists and xenophobes.
3&4) What's irrational about it? Valve can't do anything about people being assholes and ignoring communication, but they can do something about people who are unable to communicate. Trust me, I hate asshole trolling Swedes more than Russians who don't speak English, but that's a different problem altogether and not what the blog is about. I don't assume they don't speak English because they write Cyrillic, I assume they don't speak English if they refuse to respond or react to English WHILE speaking Cyrillic.
It's really simple: Valve just needs to make it so that you DON'T get matched with people who haven't enabled your language setting, which takes care of the uncertainty, then they need to enforce it. This could mess up matchmaking times a buttload, but it would be worth a try to silence the complainers and see how it goes.
1&2) I read the blog post differently. First of all it doesn't use the word racist anywhere. It talks about cloaked xenophobia in a very specific context. It adresses the problem of people going from "I met a lot of nationality-X assholes" to "Everyone of nationality X is an asshole". I think we can agree that this is bad and should be avoided.
3&4) But you can't distinguish people that refuse to communicate from people that can't communicate and that is why I'm saying you're being irrational. I do get the source of frustration but in every specific instance this has happened to you, you can never be sure that the people didn't simply refuse to communicate. Because in order to confirm this you need to communicate with them somehow.
Valve could do that, but it would marginalize part of the player base, specifically the players I mentioned in the beginning that speak none of the "option languages" and effectively put a language barrier into the game. These player will then simply ignore the function and enforcing could only be done by administring language test. So you don't really solve the problem, alienate part of the player base in the process, introduce a complicated to enforce game requirement and will most likely enrage the community even further.
1&2) The problem is not what you can gather from the blog post, obviously I agree that people saying Russians are idiots is problematic. The problem is the way it was worded, as you can see from the reaction in this topic. Pyrion is basically pointing a finger at everyone who is annoyed by people who disregard language barriers, and acts as if they are all the kind of people who call all Russians idiots. This is what I wrote earlier in the topic, if pyrion wants people to stop saying "Russians/Brazilians are idiots" and start saying "Man, it's annoying when people don't know the language and play weird because of it", he should have said so. The fact that he didn't means the blog is poorly worded at best, dumb at worst.
3&4) No, you can't distinguish them on a case by case basis, but that's not relevant. We are talking about a widespread problem on the ladder every day. Just because no one can be sure whether or not it was the issue in the specific game they just played, the problem is widespread enough that it's still valid to complain about.
I don't think we need a language test. It's enough to report people for bad communication. Whether it was bad communication because the other player is a D-bag or because he doesn't speak the language wouldn't matter. All it would need is enforcement.
On October 24 2013 04:14 [TGU]SOL wrote: Valve could just add a tick box option for every language they don't actually have to support those languages, just add them as a MM option, the real issue is players selecting languages they cant communicate in when there are language options they can.
Spin it how you like, you can try to be ironic and sarcastic like PF tried to do , but valve need to address it and those players selecting unsuitable language options just wont stop even if they have suitable language options and unlike PF I have the backbone to say so ,it's a game and not some peace movement for would be PC brigade members.
And don't lump it in with oh players of the same language can be abusive and uncommunicative ..etc etc that is a different issue.
I assume you're replying to me. Although I can't be sure because your reply indicates that you didn't read my last post. Please explain how you intend on enforcing this language option and how you want to prevent players leaving the game as a consequence of belonging to a small player pool with long matchmaking times due to speaking a certain language. I'm writing this purely to try to make you think about the feasibilty of what you're asking Valve to do. Don't forget that they will have to effectively monitor voice communication in some way. Just thinking a little about it will make it clear how difficult to implement this will be in an efficient way. The results of similar thoughts on Valves part was probably the preferred language option as a solution.It doesn't seem to work.
I have generally found people who speak only a few words of English to be more helpful in communicating information about the game than the fluent Australians I am frequently matched with. A lot of said people have learned or use basic dota vocabulary in English, and I feel like it would be polite to do the converse.
A polite version of cyka.txt that compares mandarin, english, portugese, russian, spanish, any other commonly spoken languages on dota (these are the ones I encounter most) would be pretty useful for people who have learned basic pronunciation. (I guess the mandarin would have to be in pinyin.) I've been looking for such a document for a while, but I can't find one.
When I perused this article, I thought they meant foreigners as in all non-Koreans. I was confused... but that's what a Starcraft background will do to you.
On October 24 2013 00:22 Oakenshield wrote:This isn't Counter-Strike and it's hard to have fun or win if someone speaks only a language I don't. The same is true for everyone who gets hammered, match making is horrible but the one defense I will make for it is that no game that I know of can take your blood alcohol level and adjust your match making queue accordingly.
Counter-Strike communication. Good times. As long as they go Super saiyan every other match and pull the team through, he could be mute for all I care. There were so many assholes that had that "it" factor that you had to deal with too.
So according to this I am a moron and a racist. Thats interesting. Got to tell that my pupils I teach, who do have different backgrounds and got treated by me as fair as possible. Thanks TL!
On October 24 2013 09:19 bigglesbiggles wrote: I have generally found people who speak only a few words of English to be more helpful in communicating information about the game than the fluent Australians I am frequently matched with. A lot of said people have learned or use basic dota vocabulary in English, and I feel like it would be polite to do the converse.
A polite version of cyka.txt that compares mandarin, english, portugese, russian, spanish, any other commonly spoken languages on dota (these are the ones I encounter most) would be pretty useful for people who have learned basic pronunciation. (I guess the mandarin would have to be in pinyin.) I've been looking for such a document for a while, but I can't find one.
Honestly, that last paragraph made me wonder if some basic edited form of google translate wouldn't solve most problems. It's not like communication in dota is lengthy or intricate, it could probably be translated decently so when I write something in English, it could be automatically translated by russian clients into basic russian. At least then you would get your point across.
That would be ideal, but a dictionary for game-specific phrases would be a necessary first step. Google Translate can't tell me how to say "offlaner" or "aggressive tri-lane", for example. It would also help those of us who like using voice chat.
This thread is so high up on a pedestal it's not even funny.
It's easy to say all of this and imagine a perfect world where you can make a team game work with zero communication, planning, or teamwork but in reality everybody in here knows it rarely works. On occasion you have a game where your teammates don't speak your language and still do their job effectively complementing your role and winning the game, but it's so rare it's barely worth mentioning.
I think it's completely fair to tell people to keep to their own servers. I played a game once on a European server in which I was the only one who spoke English. Due to the fact that I couldn't communicate with my team, I lost the game for us. From that moment forward, I only play on US servers, because that's where I'm from. Skilled or not, lack of communication loses games.
In what sad universe is a "perfect world" one in which people can learn a small vocabulary in some foreign languages to improve their winrate in a video game? Hahahaha. It's not like 90% of the things people say in dota are even common english.
Not sure this really gets at the core issue... Players not just in dota but in this genre as a whole tend to be pretty nasty toward each other It can happen because someone feeds, doesn't read someone else's mind, doesn't speak their language, picks an unconventional item, makes a hero selection someone else thinks is dumb, etc
All of that said, I do think there's something to the idea of joining a server that matches one's language. That said, Spanish is an extremely common north american language and Portuguese isn't all that different so that doesn't bother me. Russian on an NA server doesn't make much sense though.
On October 25 2013 08:49 Gimpb wrote: Not sure this really gets at the core issue... Players not just in dota but in this genre as a whole tend to be pretty nasty toward each other It can happen because someone feeds, doesn't read someone else's mind, doesn't speak their language, picks an unconventional item, makes a hero selection someone else thinks is dumb, etc
All of that said, I do think there's something to the idea of joining a server that matches one's language. That said, Spanish is an extremely common north american language and Portuguese isn't all that different so that doesn't bother me. Russian on an NA server doesn't make much sense though.
Your first paragraph doesn't have anything to do with the issue in this thread at all. Language is just one of the many issues that people will use as a reason to be "nasty", but its certainly not the lone reason. I think its a separate topic entirely, although a very interesting one. I myself have found myself becoming more and more aggressive while playing dota as well, even though I hate other people doing it and I know its not healthy for the game or community.
On October 25 2013 08:15 bigglesbiggles wrote: In what sad universe is a "perfect world" one in which people can learn a small vocabulary in some foreign languages to improve their winrate in a video game? Hahahaha. It's not like 90% of the things people say in dota are even common english.
So in how many foreign languages can you communicate dota 2 strategy and tactics? Can you do it in Lithuanian?
The only day I asked a player "br?" meaning: Are you from brazil? Would be the same as asking "us?" or "ru?". Anyways the reason I asked is becouse the guy was good and I was looking to invite some players to make a team. The guy goes "I'm not a fucking br, fuck you". Why was the guy so agressive just becouse I asked a simple question? I can certanly tell there is some hate out there.
I play in 2 servers, Brazil and US East. I used to play US West but I was getting some lag so I gave up on that server. I play on 2 servers becouse I figure that the more options I have the less waiting time I will have. Plus I'm bilangual so I have no comunications issues on either servers. If I had a constant 30 secs wait on the local server I'd be happy to stick to one server. But since thats not the case I expand my options.
And by the way, as far as playing bad, one point wasnt mentioned in this post. I play on single draft and on all pick. Some times I'm forced to play with a hero I'm not confortable with on single draft. Or maybe I just want to try out a new hero on all pick. The point is, just becouse a player puts a bad performance on a particular hero doesnt mean they are bad. Admiral Bulldog used on only play prophet on pubs back in the day. Bet he wasnt such a pub star when playing with some other heros. So you might meet a player that plays a horrible game with invoker but has an awesome rubik. You just got unlucky he choose invoker when playing with you.
Dota 2 will be dominated by Koreans. It will be their LoL B teamers that start getting into Dota 2 too. non-Koreans won't win WCS Finals ever, Korean all-star team will always win the all-star weekend, Koreans will take the worlds 9 out of the next 10 years. Dota 2 was just released in SK, so it will be around 2 years before your idol teams like Na'Vi will be embarrassed by a Korean team.
Stop trying to beat the Koreans, try to learn from them.
On October 27 2013 01:00 TaishiCi wrote: Dota 2 will be dominated by Koreans. It will be their LoL B teamers that start getting into Dota 2 too. non-Koreans won't win WCS Finals ever, Korean all-star team will always win the all-star weekend, Koreans will take the worlds 9 out of the next 10 years. Dota 2 was just released in SK, so it will be around 2 years before your idol teams like Na'Vi will be embarrassed by a Korean team.
Stop trying to beat the Koreans, try to learn from them.
^LOL I read the OP and then jumped to the last page and out of nowhere is a Korean guy talking about how Dota 2 will be dominated by koreans. That's so random and hilarious and stereotypical and devastatingly ironic given the context, I can't help but laugh.
My years of playing counter-strike competitively has taught me, through purely anecdotal evidence, that Brazillians and Russians cheat in video games more than other nationalities.
On October 25 2013 08:15 bigglesbiggles wrote: In what sad universe is a "perfect world" one in which people can learn a small vocabulary in some foreign languages to improve their winrate in a video game? Hahahaha. It's not like 90% of the things people say in dota are even common english.
So in how many foreign languages can you communicate dota 2 strategy and tactics? Can you do it in Lithuanian?
Approx zero at the moment, but I hope to increase my ability to do the basics to one. I'm not talking about anything complicated here. More information about what's going on / how to lane / what enemy team is doing. If you want to give me a primer on how to say basic dota stuff in Lithuanian, I'll certainly write it down in case I need it. As I said in my earlier posts, there's a problem in finding translations of game-specific vocabulary. Cyka.txt, for example, mostly focuses on insulting people, which probs won't help your teammates play better.
On October 27 2013 01:00 TaishiCi wrote: Dota 2 will be dominated by Koreans. It will be their LoL B teamers that start getting into Dota 2 too. non-Koreans won't win WCS Finals ever, Korean all-star team will always win the all-star weekend, Koreans will take the worlds 9 out of the next 10 years. Dota 2 was just released in SK, so it will be around 2 years before your idol teams like Na'Vi will be embarrassed by a Korean team.
Stop trying to beat the Koreans, try to learn from them.
Call me when a Korean team takes down Na'Vi and Alliance at TI4-TI5. Until them you have a lot to learn from the Dota 2 teams, because I have seen the Korea leagues and no amount of LoL B-teamers is going to bring them to the level of Alliance or Na'Vi or DK.
Pyrion Flax completely sidestepped the primary problem with foreigners playing on servers other than their own, and that problem is lag. I suspect this is the case because he plays mostly on Europe and the Russian players may or may not at least have playable latency. As a US west player there have been MANY games in my experience where because of the arbitrary decisions of matchmaking that doesn't take into account player pings result in complete stomps or un-winnable games because of the disparity in latency between two teams.
If you type ping into the console you can see the ping of all the players in a game, I have noticed in the past that I was matched with 4 players who had 280+ ms ping while the other team had nobody over 120ms. As the only player on my team with a 70ms ping how am I supposed to win? Conversely I have been in games where every single player has 300ms pings except for me and I get ultra kills with relative ease on snowball heroes like qop simply because my opponents can't react to anything fast enough. I can understand Russian players playing on EU East/West, but US West? How does that make any sense? How can you say I have no right to be upset at a player base who routinely joins games only to pause repeatedly while they re-connect to game (as if that eliminates the Pacific/Atlantic ocean barriers between us) only to just quit 5 minutes later.
I find it to be selfish to not feel bad about mindlessly wasting 9 other people's time who just want to play a fun game. In my mind it is no different than joining a game and feeding on purpose, except that this is born out of willful ignorance as opposed to malice. Sure maybe the community's response to these player groups maybe racist at times, but I think it is too easy to play the race card here and ignore the underlying and more pragmatic issue at hand. From what I understand the latency to the South American servers is absolute crap, whether that is the fault of their local ISPs or Valve's server configurations I don't know. But until this problem is solved the community will continue to suffer as a whole because people will continue to keep playing an unplayable game because they love Dota so much.
On October 31 2013 04:54 navalverde wrote: Pyrion Flax completely sidestepped the primary problem with foreigners playing on servers other than their own, and that problem is lag. I suspect this is the case because he plays mostly on Europe and the Russian players may or may not at least have playable latency. As a US west player there have been MANY games in my experience where because of the arbitrary decisions of matchmaking that doesn't take into account player pings result in complete stomps or un-winnable games because of the disparity in latency between two teams. If you type ping into the console you can see the ping of all the players in a game, I have noticed in the past that I was matched with 4 players who had 280+ ms ping while the other team had nobody over 120ms. As the only player on my team with a 70ms ping how am I supposed to win? Conversely I have been in games where every single player has 300ms pings except for me and I get ultra kills with relative ease on snowball heroes like qop simply because my opponents can't react to anything fast enough. I can understand Russian players playing on EU East/West, but US West? How does that make any sense? How can you say I have no right to be upset at a player base who routinely joins games only to pause repeatedly while they re-connect to game (as if that eliminates the Pacific/Atlantic ocean barriers between us) only to just quit 5 minutes later. I find it to be selfish to not feel bad about mindlessly wasting 9 other people's time who just want to play a fun game. In my mind it is no different than joining a game and feeding on purpose, except that this is born out of willful ignorance as opposed to malice. Sure maybe the community's response to these player groups maybe racist at times, but I think it is too easy to play the race card here and ignore the underlying and more pragmatic issue at hand. From what I understand the latency to the South American servers is absolute crap, whether that is the fault of their local ISPs or Valve's server configurations I don't know. But until this problem is solved the community will continue to suffer as a whole because people will continue to keep playing an unplayable game because they love Dota so much.
1. Omg great wall of text of doom! No one is going to be able to read that without going crosseyed. 2. Let this thread die. It has run its course