Suggestion: Faction Languages

[William the Drake]

In the game of ArcheAge, each race and faction has their won unique language. Meaning when they type in any chat, only those who know their language can read it. For example, the Nuia Alliance Faction consists of Nuians and Elves. Elves can speak with their allied Nuians using the "Nuia" dialect. However, should the elves wish to speak only with their fellow elves, these players can switch to the "Elven" dialect, rendering everything they say illegible to their Nuian allies. 

 

Each player can "learn" another language by improving their proficiency of that language. So a Nuian can learn to speak Elven or even Haranyan (the enemy faction). But what does a player see when someone is speaking another dialect? How does improving the proficiency of a language work:

 

A player's proficiency in a dialect will dictate what they can see when reading another dialect.

• At 0%, a player reading a foreign dialect spoken will see only symbols: !@##$ %& (?%@ *> [*##*?%
• As the player's proficiency increases, they will be able to make out more and more of what is spoken: H@ll$ m& n?m@ i> [illi?m
• Until the proficiency is 100%, meaning the player can read anything spoken in this dialect: Hello my name is William

I propose that a similar system be implemented for Naval Action where players know only the language of the nation they started in. This would make cross-nation cooperation a bit more difficult, as well as provide benefits for players who wish to specialize as diplomats and representatives. (This could also limit a good bit of abuse via chat)

 

Furthermore, I believe there should be no "Pirate" dialect. In a system where players must commit acts of piracy to become pirates, and not simply selecting them as a starting option, Pirates will retain the language of their original starting faction, before they went pirate. This would result in a pirate population that is a hodgepodge collection of languages, resulting in more difficult coordination between pirates, and possibly even hostilities, just as the true pirates of the era were a mix of sailors from all nations speaking a variety of languages. 

 

Now, I'm sure that the first argument will be that [insert voice comms. program here] will negate any effect that this type of mechanic would have. I disagree on these grounds.

1. Not everyone will have your type of comms program, or any at all in some cases. Whereas every player will have access to the in-game chat.
2. The presence of voice comms has not undermined the effect in AA. This may be due to the larger size of player population for said game, however I believe it is the fact that a majority of the players do not use voice coms unless they have to.

[mirror452]

The flaw in this suggestion is that currently diplomats do work mostly on TeamSpeak, as far as I know. So they don't use the ingame comm mostly anyway, rendering the feature just a nuisance, unfortunately.

(Although it does look like an interesting suggestion)

Edited June 17, 2016 by mirror452

[Jean Ribault]

Are you suggesting then that because I chose France as my faction that I would either need to be able to speak French (which I cannot) or not participate in the nation chat room?  I really wanted to play in the French faction, and that would certainly limit my enjoyment of the game.  I'm sure that would go for other similar players, right?

[William the Drake]

Are you suggesting then that because I chose France as my faction that I would either need to be able to speak French (which I cannot) or not participate in the nation chat room?

 

No no, you've got it all wrong. This mechanic utilizes the concept of in-game dialects. This is why instead of simply scrambling letters, it replaces letters with symbols, meaning no matter what language you actually type, it still comes out illegible to someone of another faction in game. Let me explain:

 

Let's say I am playing France and you are playing language. In-game, our characters only "know" the French and English dialects, respectively, as such

• I type, in English in real-life, "You vile British dog!", however, because your character only knows English, and my character is speaking French in-game all you see is "@*! ^( %{&?&)+ -!>"
• Even if I were to type "Parlais vous Francais?" in chat, it would still come out as "@!?&!:$ ^)*$ %?!~+!:$" to you. if your character had learned French, you would still see "Parlais vous Francais". If you then told me "I do not speak French" I could type back; "Sorry, so you speak English?" and you would still be able to read that.

Basically, if you chose the French faction, your character would know the French dialect, meaning you could read anything other players "speaking" that dialect would write, whether they actually wrote it in English, French, or what have you in real life. 

 

I know this can be dreadfully confusing when dealing with real world languages, which is why I led off with ArchAge's fictitious dialects as examples. So one last attempt to clear this up: there are many people playing ArcheAge, and a large number if my guild are Polish and Czech. We are Nuian, meaning we speak the Nuian Dialect. Our enemies are the Haranyans, who speak the Haranyan dialect. If a Haranyan yells at me, all I see is "!@# %!* !*^#" because my characters has not leveled up the Harnayan language proficiency. Now, if I did know Haranyan, I would be able to see what they are saying, but if they Speak Polish in Real life, and are typing in polish, I will see Polish.

 

I hope this clears things up, if only somewhat. You can watch this video on the ArcheAge Languages as it works there.

[Skully]

It'll lead to us going to external chat means and blaming NA for having a rotten chat system.