Have toruble uncderstanding the other faction. This is a simple AddOn for use in World of Warcraft, that allows you to speak to and understand other factions and languages. The extent to which this will work depends entirely on the amount of people that use it: the BabelFish translates any in-game language into an intermediate code (which I playfully refer to as “Babel”), which your console will then translate for you automatically! However, the speaking player must be using the Babelfish’s translation script in order for the translation to work properly.
It won’t be brutal. The smart thing to do would be expand the swapping so that all punctuation characters are replaced by other punctuation characters at random.
It’s not just Babel. I haven’t tried Babel, but I’ve started talking to Alliance players in 1337.
A level 60 Alliance guy was around in Desolace when my gf level to 34, and he ran over and said
6 |~ /-\ 7 5 !!
34!!
And we hugged and danced around, and had one of the most fun moments I’ve had playing WoW. No way Blizzard will let that go on.
Certainly doesn’t bother me any. I always thought Blizzard’s decisions on the language situation were short-sighted.
As to them fixing it in the next patch…no. I can think of many things that are better ways for the devs to spend their time than fixing this pseudo-bug.
The way it operates is, when someone uses the /sb or /sy command, the interface takes what you type after that, and changes it into a string of numbers and characters.
/sb Hello!
becomes
@#52#92#66#66#25! (those aren’t the right numbers, but you get the gist.)
If you have the mod installed, any time your interface sees anyone speaking or yelling something start with “@#”, it’ll automagically translate it for you.
So there are two conclusions we can immediately draw. One, if this catches on, people who don’t have the mod installed will see a lot of gibberish from time to time (each character of text spoken translates into a # and two numbers, so it’s really a non-trivial amount of gibberish), and two, if Blizzard wants it to go away, they can just have the server scramble lines of text with numbers in it. I do not imagine this would take much processing time; seems pretty trivial.
If I am wrong, and it is technologically infeasible for them to do that… they could just give 24 hour bans to people using it. After a warning or two, presumably. I find it hard to imagine that they’d take that route while any in-game method of learning other languages is not yet implemented.
I agree that they have more important things to worry about. I think there’s still a few useful Priest spells left to destroy, they need to get on that. So maybe it’ll stick around for awhile.
At any rate, everyone might as well install it. Especially if you’re on a PvP server. You need not use it actively in order to read what other people are saying.
