Why doesn't this game support arabic characters?

Geroken777

Out of curiosity, but I'm sure that arab speaking countries would've been disappointed if they played this game. Any plans on implementing this, ZOS?

EDIT: I mean letters not as if in NPCs just to clear this up. Sorry for the confusion! >_<

Prof_Bawbag

Edit: misunderstood the OP

Everstorm

Idolatry is haram.

Royaji

Because it's not one of the supported languages? I'm not a game industry expert or something but don't think there is a huge market for a fantasy MMO in arabic countries.

Ilithyania

I have made some middle-eastern friends in ESO, they dont miss arabic characters in game. Redguard zones and architecture etc implement alot of their RL culture i belive.

TheShadowScout

Ilithyania wrote: »

I have made some middle-eastern friends in ESO, they dont miss arabic characters in game. Redguard zones and architecture etc implement alot of their RL culture i belive.

Much of redguard fluff -is- based on "1001 nights", much like bretons are based on western europe medieval knightly myth and legends, or nords on viking myths, or elves on the various folktale-derived depiction ot elves in more modern fantasy settings (Middle-earth, D&D), while argonians borrow heavily from central american natives in fluff and style, just like khajiit do from india...

Its all derived from people of western culture thinking up a fantasy world after all. So, obviously, they would look to that they had most historical knowledge first... which explains why we have what we have.

As for arabic letters in the game... I expect ZOS just does not see enough profit in those regions to make the investment. That seems to be the driving motivation after all... and let's be honest, the lands with the highest ratio of fantasy nerds willing to drop their pocket money for online games IS in the western world, north america, followed by europe, followed by asia...

JamuThatsWho

Just FYI; OP means letters, not NPCs and environments.

jaschacasadiob16_ESO

There is no profit in implementing support for arab characters. Simply because most of those people who have access to the internet and play the game either speak english or french, even if not necessarily mastering the language.

ZOS is not an ONG. They exist to make profit.

Geroken777

jaschacasadiob16_ESO wrote: »

There is no profit in implementing support for arab characters. Simply because most of those people who have access to the internet and play the game either speak english or french, even if not necessarily mastering the language.

ZOS is not an ONG. They exist to make profit.

I find this really false, they do indeed make this game to earn profit to an extent; however....

The whole world doesn't speak just English and French, and there are plenty of Arabic players.

Danikat

I suspect it's at least partially because if they supported arabic characters they'd also need at least 1 person in Customer support who can read arabic script, so if someone gets reported for something they said they can actually review and act on it.

And depending on where in the world their support staff are based that could be a difficult skill to come by and potentially expensive to hire.

MerlinPendragon

Absolutely not!

Please do not add this to the game ZOS

mb10

The ignorance in this thread's replies is embarrassing.

red_emu

Maybe because you would need to mirror flip the entire UI to support arabic script?

Aliyavana

MerlinPendragon wrote: »

Absolutely not!

Please do not add this to the game ZOS

Why?

Ley

There are plenty of languages that ESO doesn't support. I assume it's not worth the investment to translate the entire game for a vast minority of the player base.

Edit: After re-reading this thread it seems like this is about chat supporting Arabic text. Not sure why that wouldn't be included, doesn't seem like it would be terribly difficult.

Xerikten

please don't waste resources on this. there are far higher priority issues that needs to be taken care of.

Nelson_Rebel

I agree with most everyone else


There isn't much of a market for those
countries because the amount of population in those areas who can access the internet is substantially smaller than most of the world besides African nations potentially.


Not to mention the complexities of hiring a support staff who can actually speak that tongue and read their language fluently. And how much money ZoS would need to spend to get the entire game to be re-done to support the scripts in that language.


It wouldn't give any profits to do so, and would be a waste of resources.

Lokryn

The cost to implement new languages into a game is very high, more than most people expect. As a business, the cost vs profit ratio is probably not high enough to do it.

Tan9oSuccka

MerlinPendragon wrote: »

Absolutely not!

Please do not add this to the game ZOS

Why not?

That’s a pretty big portion of the worlds population to ignore.

Nelson_Rebel

Tan9oSuccka wrote: »

MerlinPendragon wrote: »

Absolutely not!

Please do not add this to the game ZOS

Why not?

That’s a pretty big portion of the worlds population to ignore.

Not likely. Most of those countries internet access is Substantially smaller than any other part of the world.


The costs to support the functions for re-doing the entire games scripts and hiring an entire support staff capable of reading and speaking that language in america is very costly.


Not anywhere near worth the effort for that part of the world.

I would do asianic regions if anything,
large customer support base potential and high wealth and internet access areas all over there mostly

ghastley

red_emu wrote: »

Maybe because you would need to mirror flip the entire UI to support arabic script?

Right to left text doesn't require everything else to be mirrored, especially as Arabic number notation is the one we all use. I don't know how the Japanese UI looks, but that is likely to need more adaptation for text entry. However, apart from entering your character's name, and the chat box, there's not a lot of text entry in playing the game.

Bi-directional text entry in chat could be a nasty, but it's not insoluble.

And of course, Arabic is not the only language written right to left. One bi-di solution covers all of them.

driosketch

It did take them a while just to add Japanese text to the game. And when they did there were bugs, like map tooltips in Craglorn showing kanji even when playing in English. Even recently, they had to patch it in for the Summerset update because it was left out. Let's add to that existing special characters which have been known to make adding or contacting players that use them not always work.

That said, if this game is around long enough, I expect they will eventually add something like that. I also expect it to be a buggy mess, and as such don't see them adding it until they get a full handle on the letters they have now.

Tan9oSuccka

Nelson_Rebel wrote: »

Tan9oSuccka wrote: »

MerlinPendragon wrote: »

Absolutely not!

Please do not add this to the game ZOS

Why not?

That’s a pretty big portion of the worlds population to ignore.

Not likely. Most of those countries internet access is Substantially smaller than any other part of the world.


The costs to support the functions for re-doing the entire games scripts and hiring an entire support staff capable of reading and speaking that language in america is very costly.


Not anywhere near worth the effort for that part of the world.

I would do asianic regions if anything,
large customer support base potential and high wealth and internet access areas all over there mostly

Hmm. I guess I wouldn’t discount their potential impact. Arab nations encompass a population of 423 million people.

The total US population is around 320 million.

Food for thought.

Doctordarkspawn

Geroken777 wrote: »

jaschacasadiob16_ESO wrote: »

There is no profit in implementing support for arab characters. Simply because most of those people who have access to the internet and play the game either speak english or french, even if not necessarily mastering the language.

ZOS is not an ONG. They exist to make profit.

I find this really false, they do indeed make this game to earn profit to an extent; however....

The whole world doesn't speak just English and French, and there are plenty of Arabic players.

And without the math to back that up we dont know that.

ssorgatem

The Arabic script is right-to-left.
Adding support to right-to-left text to a game that was designed with just left-to-right in mind is not trivial.

And what for? None of the supported languages use such a script.

There are many other scripts the game doesn't support.

Lysette

Well, the chat window is anyway outdated and sub-par - I saw better chat in games 20 years ago. It would anyway need some upgrade to present day standards, it is really hard to chat with it with more than one channel active.

NoTimeToWait

ghastley wrote: »

Right to left text doesn't require everything else to be mirrored, especially as Arabic number notation is the one we all use.

But it certainly requires different margins and spacing, which as we can see from Cyrillic, is unsolvable issue.

P.S. Arabic numerical system is actually not arabic (it was improved and spread by them, yes), but comes from India.

jaschacasadiob16_ESO

Geroken777 wrote: »

jaschacasadiob16_ESO wrote: »

There is no profit in implementing support for arab characters. Simply because most of those people who have access to the internet and play the game either speak english or french, even if not necessarily mastering the language.

ZOS is not an ONG. They exist to make profit.

I find this really false, they do indeed make this game to earn profit to an extent; however....

The whole world doesn't speak just English and French, and there are plenty of Arabic players.

Yea living in a Country whihc was a colony of where english is learned at school...

Varana

Population numbers don't really say much. (Theoretical) internet access, neither.
What matters is disposable income and the willingness to spend it on stuff like ESO.
And in that regard, the Middle East still trails a lot behind other regions. Even in countries where part of the population has money, like the UAE, the MMO market is relatively small, for various reasons, and those are only a small fraction of the Middle East. People don't just start buying videogames once they got money.
And with that, adding support for Arabic script (with all the additional technical issues) unfortunately fails the cost-benefit analysis at this time, I fear.

Yzalirk

Can we get Dothraki too?

TequilaFire

Please don't leave the Klingon out, you know the universe contains more than just the planet Earth.
Not sure about their Internet connections though!