The Effects of EU Shard Merges

A couple days ago, Trion merged many of the EU shards together in hopes of creating a larger, more vibrant community for players to enjoy content. The EU wargroups were also merged into one, which means they all share the same dungeon, warfront, and Conquest pool. Community is good, and shorter dungeon queues are always welcome, except for one tiny, important detail– folks on the EU shards don’t all speak the same language.

This has created a little bit of a stir among the EU community since the change happened. Grouping in RIFT doesn’t always require communication, of course, but it sure helps, and sometimes, when players are newer to the game, or strategies aren’t coming together correctly, communication is needed. When you have French, German, and English-speaking players all in the same group, communication can be kind of rough. Here are some community responses regarding this change, and some ideas for Trion to maybe implement in the future.

Here’s a prefect example of what some players have been faced with since the change, which comes from this forum thread:

“After yesterday’s massive EU Wargroup merge I’m finding it extremely difficult/frustrating to communicate with players from French+ German shards in Random Dungeons/Warfronts as there is quite a substantial language barrier between us.

Yesterday just for a bit of ‘fun’ I decided to try out to mentor down and try and Random Dungeon Feature… I was put into a King’s Breach group where the tank was only french speaking, the healer and another of the dps only spoke German, myself who only speaks English and another player who seemed to speak both German and English. I was the only mentored level 50 and from what I gathered the remaining players were fairly new to the King’s Breach dungeon and Rift in general.

Now normally this wouldn’t be a problem I’m fine with new players, I’m more than happy to explain tactics and what to do in dungeons… but it’s insanely frustrating when you can’t really do much to help them as your both speaking completely different languages. This lead to quite a bit of confusion on the tank’s behalf of what to do as the french tank and the German player started arguing in two different languages… and ultimately the group disbanding and the palm of my hand meeting my face once again along with a sigh of frustration.

So I’ve come up with 3 ‘Solutions’ to eliminate this problem
- Revert the changes made yesterday to the EU wargroups
- Add an Ingame Translate that’s at least 42x better than google’s
- Add an additional Role to the LFG system ‘Translater’”

Later on in the thread, other players go on to suggest that Trion add a simple checkbox option in the group finder tool that would place players who speak the same language together. The problem with this option, is, of course, the fact that queues would extend even longer, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the merge in the first place. Final Fantasy XI had an extremely rough in-game translation tool that seemed to kind of do the job. Trion could go this route, but a tool like this may take a while for the team to develop.

It’s difficult to say what route would be best for Trion to take on solving this language barrier issue, but it’s definitely something for them to think about with the development of Storm Legion in full-swing.