Whoa there people. Didn't mean to spark off such a rant from everybody just by joking about the linked video!
Still it's good fun to read, so let it roll on
I think it's a bit much to expect everybody to use perfect grammar - I know mine isn't always perfect, but I try my best. Similarly, Marian's isn't always perfect, such as the phrase that she ends with a preposition in her last paragraph, but again, she tries her best as she points out... to start moaning about these minor things would indeed be ridiculous.
On the other side, with which you so strongly fight, Phalynx, is the idea that there's no need to put any effort into writing in a coherent manner (strangely, although you are so vocal for this, you do actually type with pretty reasonable grammar etc).
There are various reasons why a total lack of grammer etc can cause problems - these are all things I have discovered from playing another online game:
1) You don't always get understood correctly if you type with awful spelling. I've had more than one potential war looming in War of Empires just because two people on opposing clans wrote so badly that they misinterpreted each other and got into a fight over it.
2) It's damn hard for foreign players who are trying to improve their English. Imagine it - you've spent however long it is learning English, and then you come up against msn-messenger-speak. I play War of Empires with a number of Dutch and Indonesian players, and some of them have had real problems understanding some of the English teenagers due to the teenagers' appalling standards of writing.
3) People don't listen to what you say. On a few occasions, someone has made a good point on our forum, but made it in awful English. I have had to re-iterate points that they've made before because others reading the thread just glanced over it and couldn't be bothered to spend time translating it. One of the other moderators has, from time to time, actually edited the post and written it out in English underneath (similar to Seko adding his translation to his own post earlier) because he fears that otherwise a good point will go unnoticed.
If a newspawn arrives in Cantr and writes in bad English, people may well glance over it, and if their eyes don't pick it out and read it as they skim over the last day's events, they may not be heard. For example, did anyone here actually manage to read all of Seko's untranslated paragraph? I got halfway through it, and my brain told me to move on as it was too tired to cope with it!
On the War of Empires forum, Mosher has made a name for himself as a truely dreadful speller. Now part of this is because he just isn't a natural writer, and he's much better with science and maths. When he puts some effort in (which he did for a while, using some of the ideas Marian mentioned just now), his posts were perfectly easy to read - by no means perfect, but the errors he made were decipherable.
Other times, he doesn't bother, and the errors he makes naturally are compounded by the errors he makes by not bothering to use a dictionary or spell checker, and are compounded by his msn-language, and are compounded by his typos and lack of proofreading. All these together can make his posts into total rubbish.
A recent post, a suggestion for a game improvement, was:
Can use google to proxy if you dont have it on login :
www.warofempires.com/WOE7/EN/login.jsp could it be /login.jsp instead becouse woe is blocked and we want too use it in lessons THEY MAKE US DO WORK!! Anyway, When you use google it opens the full link in java so it is blocked think you can change it so it aint?
To which the Game Designer/Admin's first reply was:
Huh?
which was then repeated by the next person to read the thread! Took another few hours and a rephrase before the poor admin could understand the problem, let alone do something about it. Wasted both their time.
So I don't expect people to spend four hours reading up on the difference between "would" and "should", making sure they say "less" instead of "fewer" or vice versa, checking for split infinitives and saying "as if" instead of "like" if they follow it with a verb...
...but I do expect people to write in a fashion that allows me to read what they write at the same speed I'd expect to read most other things. Having to stop and decipher someone's post (as you'd have to do for Seko's mock one if you didn't have the translation underneath) is really annoying. Fortunately, from what I've seen so far, almost everybody in Cantr does fit into the category of typing so I can read without stopping to decipher, so I'm pretty happy on the whole.
Ok, whose turn to rant next?
psymann
I've never been involved in an rp game before. I found out about Cantr from a friend who found it googling about Esperanto... At least some of the marketing might target more people who could develop enthusiasm for a multilingual society simulator, and for whom gaming is somewhat stigmatised. The snootiness and nerdiness here put my friend off and he no longer plays, though he is a better writer, and typer, than I am.
