I’m a big fan of Dofus, despite its flaws and somewhat still immature design. I play it regularly on the International Servers since the beginning (do you remember my prophecy for the IGDC awards outcomes?) and I usually have a blast with it, but a so long permanency on their servers showed me several huge community flaws caused by the regional origin of the game.

Most of the game is plagued by really bad translations: I’m Italian, my English is far from perfect but I’ve still to understand some of the dialogs in the game. Most of the jokes are literal translations of French-oriented ones. Since Frenches have the habit to translate everything with their language they are pretty effective in the original writing but they also sound pretty alien to anyone else. I have to cross reference some names and conversations with a French colleague to dig out the “real” meaning of many phrases and names.

The naming pays a lot to the French language, too. Some names read in french or latin pronunciation recall French words, other recall English words, usually the association is a fun one, but without further investigation they seem only unimaginative and random generated to a non-French. In addition they are usually pretty hard to remember or plain ugly. The classes, for instance, while well characterized and original, have long and cumbersome names that are hard to remember (Enutrofs anyone?) since you make the point to memorize them.

These flaws can be forgiven: initially Dofus aimed to be a community-centric French game and then it exploded to international notoriety. To be honest, most of the new content features more international-friendly names and in general they are trying to make things understandable for anyone.

Another main flaw in the game community system is that International servers (English speaking) are not enforced being so. In many of them, especially the ones just opened (where, like in any other MMOG, the gold rush starts before inflation ruins everything), the older and more experienced French players flows in, with a frankly irritating attitude: ignoring anyone is not French speaking and often harassing them.

Customer support and GMs are basically doing nothing to stop hundreds of disgruntled local players that feels that there’s no place for foreigners in Dofus and this attitude is detrimental for the long term success of it outside France. If you look at the international forums that deal with Dofus you will notice that this kind of superficiality at Anakama Games is causing a lot of issues with international playerbase, issues that often became canceled subscriptions.

While no-one is suggesting a state of control where the use of foreign language is abolished, I cannot stop thinking that if WOW can have its Crushridge (full of ignorant Italian players screwing the enjoyment of anyone else), a small reality like Dofus will have several long term problems if it won’t be able to cope with the issues of a local game transforming in a global phenomenon.