Discussion: European Services Update

Since launching the City of Heroes franchise in Europe, NCsoft and, subsequently, Paragon Studios has enjoyed tremendous support from our European Communities. Going into the European launch, we knew there would be many challenges; Cultural popularity of American Comic Books, tremendous time zone differences and, a unique Community with its own particular needs. Through the years we’ve embraced these opportunities and have been very fortunate to get to know our great players from across the pond and are looking forward to many more opportunities in the years to come to get to know our Euro friends even better.

Of course, sometimes there is a cloud to a silver lining.

Freedom has been a great success on many levels; bringing new and returning players alike to City of Heroes and providing tremendous opportunity for us to deliver myriad improvements and exciting new content to our veteran Community. Even with this great success, we haven’t seen rapid growth within our French and German player base. This lack of growth has caused us to re-evaluate our position on the localization of content into French and German.

Effective immediately, we will begin to phase out all localized content for City of Heroes. Initially, this will affect Community based assets such as forums, Facebook posts and news posts on the French and German CoH websites. We anticipate redirecting all websites to the global City of Heroes Freedom website by Friday, April 20th, 2012. We will gradually sunset all localized content, with official support for the French and German game clients ending with the launch of Issue 23. We have no plans to close Vigilance (FR) or Zukunft (DE), however with Issue 23, we will be changing all game content on these servers to English only.

We plan to make this transition as smooth and seamless as possible for our French and German Communities. Please, take a few moments to review the FAQ below and if you have any further questions or concerns we can address, please feel free to ask them in the Community Discussion below.

Thanks,

Andy Belford
Community Manager
Paragon Studios


FAQ

Q: What will happen to Zukunft (DE) and Vigilance (FR)?
A: Zukunft and Vigilance will remain open. With the launch of Issue 23 all content on these servers will be transitioned to English language only.

Q: What will happen to the EU City of Heroes Websites?
A: All EU City of Heroes websites will be redirected to the North American City of Heroes website which will become our global official website. There’s no need to change your bookmarks as everything will be automatically directed to the global City of Heroes website.

Q: Will anything happen to my game account?
A: No. Your account and billing and payment options will all remain unchanged.

Q: Do I need to update my NCsoft Launcher?
A: No, your NCsoft Launcher will automatically update. Once Zukunft and Vigilance have transitioned to English language only, your game client will update automatically.

Q: Will I continue to receive customer service in French or German?
A: Yes, all customer service tickets will continue to be responded to in French or German.

Does it need to? Vigilance is also in French, just happens to be the same word in English. Although, Future has a nice ring to it.

April Fools...?



.

I can understand this decision. There around 50 Players on my Homeserver. So its a Lot of work for a few Guys.
But i'm not happy.

Of course this is not an April Fools thing, come on, people.

While I feel for the people who will not enjoy this, and it is a bit sad, I can completely understand this move.
You can see how much of an issue maintaining and continuing to produce the product in different languages can be.
In the end, they really need to look at what worth those efforts produce.

Take issue with the overall lack of globalization, perhaps, but this is just one english-speaking company, within the states, making this call based on their own situation and bottom line.

And it makes sense.
It is indeed sad for any and all German and French speaking players that we have.
I was worried the "cloud" part of the news was going to be far worse, though, based on how long the "sliver lining" intro was... Hehe.

The good news?
The percentage of English speaking people within Germany and France are a lot greater than the German/French-Speaking Americans... So, there's hope that many of these European players will remain.

However, I do understand that not all of them will.

Best of luck to all!

Sad to hear but it has been a long time coming with those 2 servers being the least populated for so many years

Hope some of the players like Beber stay

From a Resource-Logistics standpoint it makes sense. Not having to go through every line of new ingame text (as it gets updated) and translating it into multiple languages could lead to more effort being put forth to things like smoothing out actual ingame issues. It's annoying to those non-english native users, but like mentioned above there's a higher percentage of English speaking (native French/German speakers) than French/German speaking (native English speakers). Well, atleast in the U.S.A. that is.

As for Dark's suggestion, I'm pretty sure that's how it works now. The point of the post (that I got atleast) was that they're removing the ingame translation services while preserving native language tech support to VIPs.

From a post Zwill made in a French thread:

The recent German translations read like they have already been subject to cost-cutting, anyway (Ghouls becoming "Leichenfledderer" and Leprechauns "Glückswichtel" make me shudder, and they didn't even recognize the Archetype Enhancements as such). Not to mention the client issues with incomplete text and the emote menu freezing the character … I began to consider switching to English a few days ago. And now I don't even have to come to a decision …

Anyway, you have forgotten to address Mission Architect (not a surprise, either …): So far, it sets language flags depending on via which server the story in question is being published. What's to become of this?

I see the business sense, I hear the cost cutting arguments and totally understand but I'm disappointed to see it's once again the EU players who get the shaft.

I wonder how long it will be before all EU accounts get closed because of cuts.

Not a good day for anyone, my sympathies to our loyal French and German companions.

Thank you Zwill for your explanations, i'm glad that my post gave you the option to go a little deeper in the whole ordeal so that we all know what needs to be done as upkeep for those languages.

From a business view, i understand this move. As i stated before, it doesn't affect me one bit, but i know it will have a great impact on others.
This is news nobody wants to hear, and i am sorry that it has come to this.

I talked about the following with friends in the game, and we never fully understood why this never happens.
In order to gain more players, even if they start as F2P, why isn't marketing thinking about advertisement? The reason W0W and R!ft are gaining in players is because of advertisement. I see several buses with their adds driving through my city, and let us not forgot the TV Commercials.
I understand that this would take a lot of resources to do, and i'm not talking about competing for adds versus these two giants. But the fact is that if i knew about this game, i'd started sooner than i did by finding the AE Edition by chance in my local Gamest0p.
You can start small, an add page in several magazines would be a start. And don't limit it to NA only, but pick some Euro magazines too.
It doesn't all fall on Paragon Studios either, NCsoft should be dedicating resources to adds for their games too, and not just their new games.

I hope that this post opens up discussion to this topic.

It's unfortunate news but Zwill has been upfront and presented it about as best as we could hope for. And the servers themselves will be remaining open, so that's certainly better than the alternative.

In fact, I'm impressed that there have been no server closures/mergers after eight years (in fact, six have been added since launch -- Triumph, the four euro servers and the VIP-only Exalted).

Hopefully I haven't jinxed any servers by pointing this out.

True, they haven't really been promoting the game over here. Two or so press releases a year, don't notice anything else.