In-game Automatic Chat Translator OR More Taunts are needed

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Hello.

We’ve all been in this situation during multiplayer games. You end up being teamed with someone that doesn’t speak the same language you do. They are unresponsive to your attempts to chat with them, and there are no taunts to communicate the information you need them to hear. I like the idea of using taunts to speak to your teammates regardless of their language because the game already does the translating. Example: Currently, Taunt 3 (Food, please) when said in the chat will get translated and heard in Mandarin, to any Chinese players on the other end. (Assuming they have AoE2 set to that language)

The problem is, most of the existing taunts are used to command AI, so some very important commands that would be issued to a human ally aren’t covered in the current list. Here’s a few that I came up with that would help in common multiplayer situations and bridge that barrier between languages. (And might even reduce the amount of early quitters in ranked matches!)

Deleting markets, retask your trade carts!

I’m missing 2 sheep!

What language do you speak?

Send your scout here! (Flare)

Target the enemy monks!

Build a lumber camp closer to the tree line. (Flare)

Move your units out of the way. (Flare)

Clear the trade route of obstructions. (Flare)

Using the bathroom, one minute please! (Pause)

Send these villagers back to work. (Flare idle villagers)

Change your gather points to a safer location! (Flare)

Put your units in the transport ship. (Flare)

Research your blacksmith upgrades!

Research your university techs!

Stop!

Go!

Delete this wall! (Flare)

Stop harvesting my resources! (Flare)

Stop what you’re doing, evacuate, and rebuild behind me!

Clean this up please! (Flare)

Going Feudal!

Going Castle!

Going Imperial!

I’m on my way!

Hold the fort until I arrive!

Of course, this is not limited to the above suggestions. I think if these taunts were made available in all languages and were programmed into the Taunts List by default (not a mod), it would go a long way into making this game more accessible and provide a more welcoming environment to all players (because not everyone speaks English!)

11 Likes
2

Yes, this is much needed to improve the ranked the experience. I’m addition to taunts, Allied vision has to be on by default. Makes no sense to ruin the first 15 or 20m of play by limiting team work. The addition of helpful taunts and allied vision will bridge the communication gap and make the games less toxic for solo queuers.

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Please also add “Do you speak English” and “I don’t speak English”

One minute is definately not enough for bathroom usage

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The whole, “Do you speak English” would mean you’d have to do it for all languages. “Do you speak XYZ?” It was intentionally done that way to avoid discrimination or the perception of favoritism.

One minute to use the bathroom, sure, change it to “one moment”.

@zeusk0g I think if you want allied vision enabled by default, the best you’re going to get is Empire Wars where you build a market immediately. The point behind the fog of war is another layer of strategy that a team must overcome.

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Yes please, this is really needed!

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Yeah, in theory. But, if you queue solo for TGs then you know that strategizing is impossible without vision in the first 15m. Poor communication, low apm prohibits typing and explaining, just bad team mates who go ## ## pocket in arabia, runestones, this map pool’s gold in center map, and not to mention language barrier. So, there is really no point in fog of war anymore.

It is time for the devs to stop living of legacy and start bringing in new ideas. Allied vision, 6/9 vill start etc are the future of the game. Considering the devs havent fixed TG experience in almost 3 years, I doubt any of these happening any time soon.

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Mods need to take notice of this, amazing ideas!

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I think it is a good move. BTW how do make the XYZ? say:
155 is Do you speak English?
156 is Do you speak French? and so on?
Or just “What language do you speak”

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Also supporting this, especially because the current censoring system can at times be troublesome when strategizing with team. Taunts don’t get censored at least 11

At least the ‘Go!’ (and somewhat ‘Stop!’) is already covered with 14 and 2. Carries the same meaning more or less, while in combat.

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The other more ambitious idea I had was to just make the in-game chat automatically translate any and all text sent through it. The program would detect the language based on what the player has set the games default language to, and the target language would be whatever the recipient has set on their game. Obviously this idea is a lot more complicated, costly, and probably would require the licensing of software that already does this function. At least with taunts it could be done relatively cheaply.

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12

This is a very good idea. I see one of the post here use some asian char and the forum translator can somehow translate them to English which I think it is very cool

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13

Unaided auto-translation is a lot more viable for forum posts than in-game chat, because the latter is extremely abbreviated and slangy.

If you want an ambitious solution that has been done in games, the MMORPGs Final Fantasy XI and XIV have an “auto-translator” which gives players a very thorough vocabulary of common phrases and in-game terms to build sentences from, supported by auto-completion.

For an RTS, such robust features are unnecessary, though hypothetically a simple icon-based (bypassing grammar and translation complications), menu-driven Subject + Verb + Object sentence builder UI might work.

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14

Yup, it’d get too complicated and would require too much work to get it right. Still like the idea though, but felt that more taunts were a good compromise.

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15

I hear ya man. I’ve come across MANY situations where I couldn’t communicate to my teammate because of ridiculous events of poor censorship execution by the game.

Example: Challenge ## #### any Civ that…

Because of the word ### ##### aka Sp**k is considered foul language.

I worked around it by saying “Challenge Five: Choose any Civ that…”

Instead of using the word pick, and the number 5.

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19

Yes today I have a Spanish teammate and I have no idea how to communicate with each other. I really hope that the auto translate can be implemented to this game to make the life easier

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20

Nice suggestions! I fully agreed. We really need to have these in game. Good work man.

Many greetings

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21

I’ve found it’s really annoying to try and balance unranked lobbies, because sometimes the ‘split’ gets censored, or some player names ##### ##### ( p1 ## p2 team 2 pls, p3 p4 team 1 - this can get censored). Dunno why even 11

Got to work around by just saying people’s names, but it gets a little terrible when there’s Asian characters involved.

Edit: somehow what I wrote got censored as well, wth? 11 Trying to remember what I wrote but idk why this is getting censored.

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I think this forum uses the same censoring technology that the game does! 11

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