Huge Capital Rules Breach

[Sho]

The staff, and CERTAINLY not the general forum populace, do not understand life in the non-english areas.

Third that. The less popular languages are a mess - I've seen one and heard horror stories about two others.

[Oasis]

The Players Department does try to understand what it is like in underpopulated language areas, and we realize that some of the rules need to be relaxed to allow for growth to be able to occur. However, that doesn't mean blatant grouping and cooperation should be allowed, either. There isn't a language area that doesn't have several locations, and no one should have the ability to build an Empire/gang, etc. to the detriment of other players/characters.

[Sho]

I'm not arguing with that, and it's not the issue being discussed here. But if you want to know, I don't believe the rules should be relaxed - if anything, those areas need more oversight and enforcement, and if that's not possible I don't think those regions should be kept open for the sake of maybe four or five players. There's a critical mass that needs to exist before a society can have any real structure beyond a bunch of loosely associated foragers, and in my opinion "four players and or including a translator" is not it.

[Nick]

I don't see how what I said gave the impression that I think people should be allowed to operate gangs in other language groups. If anything, I'd lean towards Sho's ideas.

The main thing I've noticed is that suggestions that are bad for non-english groups are shot down, and there is little support for implementations that could really help non-english areas. That would be one example of an area that's not understood by the Anglos.

An example of this, is programmed emotes. These could be translated into different languages, so you could wave, and the person would see the wave in their own language. This has been suggested before, and all the anglos voted it down, and it never got accepted. However this is a very crucial implementation, IMO.

[Nick]

Another thing, regards to how I think language groups should be created... you shouldn't need to find the players first, and then create the language group. Find the translator. Translate the game 100% before you consider playing in it. Sorry to say, but if somebody is looking for say, a game in Zwahili, and they come across Zwahili Cantr, but it's entirely in english, they're not going to play.

The current paradox of having to find 4 active players, before those players have a language to play in, is kind of ridiculous. Finding 4 people willing to play, without even having a game to play yet is hard enough, and as Sho said even as hard as 4 is to get, it still isn't necessarily enough.

[Oasis]

I don't disagree with your ideas, and I'd be interested to see where the Anglos voted down the emote suggestion. My point wasn't saying that what I said, relaxing of cooperation rules, was your suggestion, but reality in low player language areas. I was just qualifying that, saying the relaxing doesn't mean allowing the other, so people don't get the wrong impression.

Enough said, that's off topic, as is this whole discussion for the most part.

[Schme]

Oasis, as I've said before, none of the characters know how to sail, and the town never did build ships. There is absolutly no way anything can be done about this guy. Even going to the next coastal town guessing he will go there cannot work, because as far as we know, there are no other coastal towns, certainly none any of the characters have heard of.

And you say that it is unacceptable for a player to continual try to disrupt the game with a succesion of anti-social characters. I have a feeling that this will likely not be enforced in the french area, or any other small language group. It is my belief that he likely did this in the French area as he knew no one would ever do anything. It was all preplaned, you see, just as when someone decides to rob a store, they chose a place where it is likely to simply be written off to the insurance company and the police will not waste their time looking for him.

I also stand by my assertion that there was in fact no role playing whatsoever.

It is very true though, that english players do not and to not attempt to understand the other language groups. You say the staff tries to understand, but what does that mean? What do you do to try to understand? The only person who understood that was Nick, and he got guillotined.

Nick is quite right in saying that until the areas are properly translated, the language groups are a joke. Near nothing is translated, and much of what is is poorly done. Alot of this could easily be translated in a day by a literate billingual french speaking person (in the case of the french area), forget a proffesional translator. That is the reason why no one is joining them.

That is the reason that non-english areas are underpopulated, not because non-english people wouldn't be interested. You wouldn't play a video game that hadn't been translated, would you?

I know I sound all bitc.hy here, but I'm not trying to make heads roll or anything. I'm just saying, you know? I mean, I don't really believe English players should take the effort to understand, I'm just saying that they don't.

But the allowed breach here really is ludicrous. And I'm not just saying that because I'm pissed at losing stuff. The situation has really helped my affected character in achieving his goals. But I didn't want to get there by having cheating go on. I wanted to play the game proper. Because of this guy, I'm benefiting from cheating. I have to say, it's not very much fun.

[Sho]

How did this newspawn have access to what looks like three buildings and a ship? It seems to me that a town with crossbows and iron shields should be able to keep things locked, and anything that happens due to that negligence is at least partly the responsibility of the citizens.

How do you know your character didn't miss some genuine RP? It looks like he showed up after this mass theft started.

By your argument, this player probably doesn't know French. This is one thing PD can definitely enforce - unlike the other things you've said here, which are just (in my opinion) poor playing style, choosing a language that one does not know is very solidly against the rules, and I'm sure PD would be glad to investigate it.

[Floris]

Interesting, what then about choosing a language, and spawning a char with that language within another language area?

With that I mean that the player can not help the place where his character spawns, but nor he, nor his character can understand much of what is happening because of spawning in a different language group.

I like the idea of the spawning system, though I find it a bit 'boring' to have five new Dutch characters spawn in the middle of the German area.

[Sho]

If that happens, your character (and you) must still know the language he or she was spawned as, though you are also allowed to use the local language(s) with that character (see Jos, http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7630).

[Phalynx]

Oasis, as I've said before, none of the characters know how to sail, and the town never did build ships. There is absolutly no way anything can be done about this guy. Even going to the next coastal town guessing he will go there cannot work, because as far as we know, there are no other coastal towns, certainly none any of the characters have heard of.

And you say that it is unacceptable for a player to continual try to disrupt the game with a succesion of anti-social characters. I have a feeling that this will likely not be enforced in the french area, or any other small language group. It is my belief that he likely did this in the French area as he knew no one would ever do anything. It was all preplaned, you see, just as when someone decides to rob a store, they chose a place where it is likely to simply be written off to the insurance company and the police will not waste their time looking for him.

I also stand by my assertion that there was in fact no role playing whatsoever.

It is very true though, that english players do not and to not attempt to understand the other language groups. You say the staff tries to understand, but what does that mean? What do you do to try to understand? The only person who understood that was Nick, and he got guillotined.

Nick is quite right in saying that until the areas are properly translated, the language groups are a joke. Near nothing is translated, and much of what is is poorly done. Alot of this could easily be translated in a day by a literate billingual french speaking person (in the case of the french area), forget a proffesional translator. That is the reason why no one is joining them.

That is the reason that non-english areas are underpopulated, not because non-english people wouldn't be interested. You wouldn't play a video game that hadn't been translated, would you?

I know I sound all bitc.hy here, but I'm not trying to make heads roll or anything. I'm just saying, you know? I mean, I don't really believe English players should take the effort to understand, I'm just saying that they don't.

But the allowed breach here really is ludicrous. And I'm not just saying that because I'm pissed at losing stuff. The situation has really helped my affected character in achieving his goals. But I didn't want to get there by having cheating go on. I wanted to play the game proper. Because of this guy, I'm benefiting from cheating. I have to say, it's not very much fun.

So are you offering your services as a translator?

[Chris Johnson]

The issue is not lack of translation resources over 97% of all translatable text has been translated to french.

The problem is that not all text is translatable at the moment. This is a Programming issue which has very high priority . A lot of text used in the game is not yet in a position where it can be translated, a lot of old code needs rewriting to allow interface translation - this takes time. Translation of most Error Messages,Animals, Resources, Objects and Events has been implemented.

All new features we add have translatable text implemented as standard.

[Sabsi]

Sho, as I already mentioned, the keys to the buildings and the ship were kept by a character who belonged to a banned player and died because of this. So everything he kept fell to the ground. All of this wouldn't have happened if the player wasn't banned. Of course the town is able to keep things locked but because this is an OOC event it isn't part of the responsibility of the citizens.

And my character was there all the time and I can assure you there wasn't any RP at all.

Although of course it is possible for a new character to spawn in a location that originally belonged to another language group (as it is the case with the Dutch characters spawning in the German town) this shouldn't be the case here as there weren't any characters of another language group present when all of this happened as far as I know.

[wietse]

I have had (dutch) characters that have been to the french area's and they are a lot more backward then the dutch villages that are on the same Island and even not that far away. And they are on the same coast. There is lots of travel going on the seas between them. There have been visits from romov even!

I see no problem at all in taking everything and stealing a boat. That is perfectly normal behaviour and it happens all the time in coastal villages. If you can't protect you things then the village is just to primitive. To build up such a village takes time and will not always succeed. Actually the chance of failling is bigger then succeeding. I have seen and participated in several attemps to build up a village in the dutch island and have seen them fail because of lack of resources, animal attacks and seemingly random attacks by random players. Or just when everybody fell asleep or went away.

So what to do? Don't leave stuff lying around without a lock. Make sure more then one person has a key. Maybe dont build a village on a coast, although it has its benefits. It is not impossible to build up a village with few players but its hard, like it should be.
As it is now on the island there is a big benefit in grouping together in larger villages instead of starting a new one with a few people. I think this is a good thing because otherwise it would spread the already thin population even more.

Anyway, i feel sorry for Romov as it would be good to see more interaction between the french, dutch and germans on an equal base... But a rules breach.. don't think so...

[Schme]

It's unfortunate alot of your towns died due to cheating. You should report it as I've done.

Of course the town is able to keep things locked but because this is an OOC event it isn't part of the responsibility of the citizens.

Nicely put.