North American Spanish Language Server
By
Forbin_Project,
Posted on: 2009-05-06 21:01 in Suggestions and Ideas
Rating your own topic is bad, mmkay?
If you can find the folks who speak Spanish and want this, grab them and make an "unofficial server". The Aussies have one, I believe.
However, remember though that the game isn't going to get a new server for fewer than 10% of their actual player base unless they can really prove that it's warranted. I know several South American players, who pretty much learn more and more English as they use it in the game - it IS an english-speaking and english-oriented game. I do see your point (living in a border town, I know) though I don't know whether it's really warranted.
It should be something that I'd hope they would look into for demographics, though. Maybe you should send this to Niv or Amatea and have them pass it along to the Marketing guy? They'd know best.
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Repurposed
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If you can find the folks who speak Spanish and want this, grab them and make an "unofficial server". The Aussies have one, I believe.
However, remember though that the game isn't going to get a new server for fewer than 10% of their actual player base unless they can really prove that it's warranted. I know several South American players, who pretty much learn more and more English as they use it in the game - it IS an english-speaking and english-oriented game. I do see your point (living in a border town, I know) though I don't know whether it's really warranted.
It should be something that I'd hope they would look into for demographics, though. Maybe you should send this to Niv or Amatea and have them pass it along to the Marketing guy? They'd know best.
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This.
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It should be something that I'd hope they would look into for demographics, though. Maybe you should send this to Niv or Amatea and have them pass it along to the Marketing guy? They'd know best.
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specifically, this.
By the numbers, it seems like a pretty simple parity issue -- enough people in North America speak primarily French and Spanish that they should warrant their own NA servers. Factor in South America, and those numbers only grow (plus possibly adding Portuguese into the mix). But of the people actually buying computers new enough to run CoH and in the targeted age/interest demographics, there may be a massive domination of people who speak primarily English or speak English as a second language fluently enough not to need a seperate server from a marketing perspective.
I wouldn't mind having dedicated-language (and/or officially cross-language) servers, though. So, hey, give it a shot and see what happens.
I'm all for it, if the demographics information supports it. And for something that wouldn't (I'd assume) require as much work, a Spanish language tag in MA, since we already have French and German for our Euro compatriots.
At this point this game is old enough that I don't really think they would ever bother to dedicate a new server for a different language. If anything, before the end of this game's lifetime, I'd expect to see them consolidate the number of servers, not increase them.
But clearly there's a growing number of people in the U.S. who are Spanish speaking, and I would expect that in the future of the MMO industry it would make sense that games would consider offering Spanish based servers to their players as a common practice.
Basically I think you have a good idea for future games.
I just don't see it happening for this game based on the current cost/need factors.
P.S. It's actually kind of ironic that you mentioned having players do the "grunt work" of translating the text of the game for the Devs. This game has so many English grammar and spelling errors that it's needed some proofreading work from English speaking players since Day One. 
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Seriously, 10% of the US market speaks Spanish at home, and there's no major MMO which publishes their game in Spanish. You'd also have a leg up on entering other markets.
If you don't want to have to pay obscene translation fees, just do something like Google In Your Language and let us do the grunt work for you. If you're paranoid about quality or trolls, limit it to people who have a certain veteran level (12 months?). You'd need all of two or three people to oversee the translation (mostly by defining official translation of common terms, upkeep of the translation's server, and booting/reverting the occasional spammer).
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