Sharing the misery...

Warning: this article represents my opinion only



So, it was past midnight and I was just browsing the EU forums and stumbled upon this thread. The thread itself - while justified - is not exactly groundbreaking, but Ectar's answer in it (grats on the new avatar picture, EU flag - lovely, it fits WG EU more than you know) is interesting. Basically, it's just another batch of moaning as to why they can't do officially what this blog does unofficially - but it's all nicely put together.


I will quote Ectar from the abovementioned post:

"Feedback is very important, however the English speaking community on this forum isn't the only community we have to look out for. Because the English speaking section covers multiple countries its a very busy forum section, however the German and Polish sections for example are also pretty massive, get a lot of traffic, and their feedback, questions and views are also important. For everything you want to see for the English speaking section, consider also that our other language communities also deserve that level of interaction. Seven officially supported languages, that each deserve to be treated equally. We appreciate that across our national forums not everything is in line with each other and we're doing what we can to bring things together."

What he wrote, does that sound right to you? Well... it reminded me of another quote, this time from Winston Churchill:

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."

Now, I won't put the connection between a (Bela)Russian game and socialism (that would be way too obvious), but - isn't the thing going on on EU forums simply equally sharing of misery? Like socialism, this forum attitude started with a reasonable idea: "Let's make everyone equal". Well, yes, the thing is, not everyone IS equal. Sorry, if that comes as a shock to you, but it's like that. People who don't speak (at least) English are simply limited. English is the world language, not Russian, not Chinese (well, not yet anyway), but English is.

Therefore, it's absolutely justifiable in my eyes for English-speaking people to have more attention (news, developer answer etc.) than various language mutations, because it's the one world language people of Europe learn at schools. Western feedback, guides, videos, streams... a lot of that is in English. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume English speaking people are better informed anyway than the various language forum mutations, visited by people who actually don't speak English. What does this mean for the Q&A? It means one thing: English speaking people have much higher chance of asking reasonable questions than people who don't speak English. In other words: restricting the Q&A questions to English-only would actually most likely improve their quality.

But for some reason, this doesn't apply to Wargaming EU. Wargaming EU seems to think that since it's not right to prefer one "supported" language over another and since they can't do a quality Q&A in all supported languages (which is completely true, they can't, that would be crazy), instead of offering ONE quality Q&A in English, they decided for a socialistic solution of equal misery sharing: noone gets shit. The current Q&A just sucks and it won't improve, because Wargaming is restricted by their own rules.

The obvious counterargument is: "But if we do it in English, info won't get to all the languages, right?"

Wrong.

Look at this blog for example: it gets translated (practically daily) to Czech, Polish, German (I haven't visited your community ever since the ban, but they actually had guys such as Raguel and Stormshadow doing this even before I started myself last year), French (hey Lactose), Spanish (if I remember correctly), but also Chinese and Vietnamese, funnily enough. Each community has "their" person, who stepped up and started translating it to their native language and those people have my respect too for doing it.

The same thing would happen, if what this blog does was done officially. Or if Q&A was available only in English. Players from various nations would simply step up, WG EU would get happier customers and overall the info level would rise all across the board. Instead of official sharing of... well... nothing, you'd get unofficial sharing of information, which in turn helps to build the community around the fans who step up.

But of course, that won't happen. 

Why? Because (unless WG EU hires an extra person to do the Q&A), it would actually require an EFFORT. Yea, I know, this is the part where I get told WG EU guys are working very hard and all that. Not convinced. It would be doable and I could retire :) (yea, been thinking about that a lot lately).

PS: Ectar's moaning about NA developers not being developers is also BS. Technically, he's "right", but the difference is, The_Chieftain speaks with NA players practically daily (and as a human being too, not "this won't happen and fuck off" SerB-style) on various development topics (for example, today, he said an interesting piece of info that apparently, Tiger might get a rebalance eventually - no, I don't know anything more, but he's working on something). It works there. It can work on EU too.