Majority of Players Non-English Speakers

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

Lately I have noticed an emergence of people from the US, Canada, the UK and other Engish-speaking nations have been a minority to a much more active and numerous fan base of Russians, Polish, etc.

I have found without fail that most people I meet in-game either do not speak English or speak it badly. Often my first interaction with people is them asking me if I speak their language.

While this sometimes happened in legacy (the last time I played) it is perticulairly common now I have noticed.


Credit to KrankMistkerl for posting this graph

This is very worrisome especially to English speakers looking to either recruit or find a place to live. The game only has an active player base of around 700 people, and most of these don't speak English as a first language and would rather play with people who speak the same language as them.

Already being a minority in the player base atm, and mostly already either with a group or not looking, this makes the search for English-speaking recruits and newbies for new or growing English villages very, very competative and difficult, bordering on impossible. Foreigners now have the upper hand labour-wise and will always be able to out-play the native English player base.

So why is this happening? The game is in English, is it not? Why are we becoming a minority in a game made for us? What makes this game appeal to foreigners so much to push it all the way to this point?

Discus

[Ysh]

Even during peak hours (4pm EST as I write this) Russians outnumber Americans.

I am at work because it is 4pm EST. I do not think 4pm is peak hour.

[Kaios]

It has been that way for awhile now, even when we get upwards of 300+ players during those peak times it's usually because the non-english population doubles the amount of players in US, Canada and other majority English countries. It's mostly Russian players and I don't mean that offensively it's just what I've seen.

[Patchouli_Knowledge]

The way you are speaking as if as if the majority of the game's inhabitants are mostly non-English speaking players which isn't true. It is not the first time, nor second, nor third time it has happened either. I do not think it really affects us on the forum since the official language is English (people are free to post in any language in the recruitment), not to mention there are a respective amount of people that are foreigners that can speak English.

Long story short, there isn't any issues.

Chào
你好
Bonjour
Guten tag
Hola
Привет.
Merhaba.

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

Every time I have been checking it has been Polish, Ukrainian and Russian more than anything else. You cannot say this is a non-issue when that is there for anyone to look at.

Edit: Not to mention how many people are currently trying to recruit in English in D&T right now (me included, with barely any luck personally) and how quickly even noobs with no skills are snatched as soon as they make a thread just to get another body. This is a sign of a shortage of players.

[borka]

Anneyeong (written in Latin) to Koreans always gives a good laugh at last when explaing that it's korean hello in Latin

Interesting enough a lot of russian speakers see a privet (also in Latin) as goodwill - btw in all worlds i only met one russian that didn't want to write english and refused machine translations ... most did all the work and translated my english to russian and their russian to english with translator ... i just had to give them time to do ...

and at last everyone understands a smile

Gee this must be a euro game now ...

[Grog]

Already being a minority in the player base atm, and mostly already either with a group or not looking, this makes the search for English-speaking recruits and newbies for new or growing English villages very, very competative and difficult, bordering on impossible. Foreigners now have the upper hand labour-wise and will always be able to out-play the native English player base.

Says which statistic?

Are we discussing actual numbers or just your gut feeling?

[Hasta]

You cannot say this is a non-issue when that is there for anyone to look at.

Majority of players don't have English as their first language, yes. That's just a fact, not an issue. So, what exactly IS the issue?

If what's bothering you is that "We are becoming a minority in the game made for us", well, the game was made for players and has translated and approved custom clients, so, yeah, that not exactly qualifies as an "issue" either.

[borka]

Looking at
http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/
at certain times ...

atm
89 "eastern europe" vs 42 englishspeakers (i didn't write native because of french candians)
which are
131 of 195
so 36 speak spanish, french, german, italian, netherlandse, kroatian, korean, mandarin ... (now that's minority)

[Ysh]

Already being a minority in the player base atm, and mostly already either with a group or not looking, this makes the search for English-speaking recruits and newbies for new or growing English villages very, very competative and difficult, bordering on impossible. Foreigners now have the upper hand labour-wise and will always be able to out-play the native English player base.

This seems as crux of issue. Even if we are granting every other claim you make, I do not think this is problem. Is every English speaker player working together in game? Of course not. Why I will assume all Russian player is working together in game? So what is problem if non-English player is having more labor? Why is this making it impossible to play as English?