- RC Master
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- Exalted Mythic Member
Halo 3 (31st), ODST (14th) and Reach (4th) Mythic Conqueror. (Mythic is Solo, Legendary, All skulls on + scoring on and no deaths/saves).
Staff Writer and speedrun record holder at highspeedhalo.net
Ignorance is the true enemy of all things.
Rocking Bungie.net for over 8 years!
Look, what it really comes down to is two things:
1. Organisation,
2. Moderation.
You can't just go lifting all the language restrictions on all the forums: you'd have Spanish threads next to English ones, Chinese ones next to Polish ones. For everyone that does not speak those languages, those threads are clutter, spam. They're completely useless and unintelligable to you. So, what do you do? You either update all the forums with language filters (which adds hasle to posting: "I am posting in... english") or you create new forums that are language specific (like, the French Reach forum, or whatever). Still, that is more navigational clutter and duplication of forums of each specific language you support and, heh, there are a lot of potential languages.
So even if you can solve the organisational issues, you still have the problem of moderation. B.net is attempted to be kept friendly and clean by a team of community volunteer moderators and a handful of Bungie Employees where managing b.net and the moderators is but a small part of their job. Most (if not all) of the moderators don't fluently speak other languages, and there is unlikely to be much commonality among any languages they do happen to speak. So you need new moderating teams for each language you support. However, if none of the Bungie staff speak said languages, how can they keep tabs on them? How do they know the moderating team is doing what it is supposed to if they don't know what is being said? So you need a bi-or multi-lingual member of staff to watch over it. Without spending several years training a current employee in the relevent languages, you need to hire someone for the job, and multi-lingual people are hard to come by. Much more difficult to come by, I imagine, are those wanting to work as a community rep for a video game company, in the united states.
Finally, even if you did make the hire, one of the points of the b.net is for Bungie to watch over their community, to see what they're talking about, gather feedback and impressions from the most hardcore and, occasionally, to interact with them directly. If most of your staff can't read most of your non-english forums, all that is lost.
Don't get me wrong: I too look forward to the day when all the world's peoples can communicate freely. Hopefully within our lifetimes that will be enabled by massively improved machine translations. But for now the issues stand, largely unassailable without a large investment for what may unfortunately be a very small gain: it is the unfortunate truth that Bungie's games are most popular in English speaking countries. Part of this is undoubtedly to do with them being originally made in english, but once you've created the conditions, getting people in the forum (at least a few) is a whole new task in itself.
Bottom line:
Should it be? Ideall not.
Will it remain that way for the foreseeable future? Yes, it will.
[Edited on 09.05.2011 4:18 PM PDT]