Whitelist languages

[somekindofpony]

Every language should be whitelisted because a lot of people are adding random languages to their characters because it's easy to. Even in the future, people are not any smarter than they are today, and would need to put effort into learning the languages. Some simple questions would be a good way to determine who does and does not deserve to use a language.

1: Why does your character speak this language?

2: When did they learn this language?

3: How did they learn this language?

4: How does this language affect their life?

[Arbon]

Eeehh, that's a very American way to look at things. Most people on most parts of the world know 2 or 3 languages before age 10 just as a necessary part of life, and getting into the squeakin SPACE AGE is not going to make that any less of a necessity when meeting with aliens becomes a thing. If you know three languages you are trilingual. If you know two languages you are bilingual. If you know one language, your American. The idea of only knowing one language is so unique to Americans in the modern age it's a downright embarrassment, humans in particular are a species in which a huge chunk of your brain is entirely devoted to linguistic comprehension.

I really do not see how adding more effort on part of the admins to players who want to know a specific language are going to help anything be more realistic, or more fun for the players. It'd just cripple flavor to make sure cats can't meow or lizards can't snarl, with no clear benefit.

[Wickedtemp]

Pros: It would prevent everybody and their dog from knowing the demonic language simply because it's new and shiny.

Cons: Prevents my snowflake from being even more special. See, I have an entirely black dragon character with red eyes and red wings, his name is Killgore Maimsword. He learned the demon languages because his parents were killed when he was little and he swore revenge, so he kills a lot of demons. Through his travels he learned how to do everything and has a very advanced mind and stuff, which is surprising because he's only 17...

...

So, yeah, honestly I'd support something like this. It's just... I don't know, it's just a little weird seeing unathi and sometimes even MICE characters speaking a primarily feline language. Like, I get that you may want to get your Disney Princess on and speak in birdsong, but if you aren't a bird-like character, I'd support a whitelist. At least have it required to know the lore behind it or something, I don't know.

[Arbon]

A mouse speaking feline is just someone who wanted to know when the cats were talking about eating him behind his back Its not like languages are a secret nor especially hard to learn, and the game caps you at 3 ... or only 2 if you happen to be human. In a world where aliens are a thing that exists and are working alongside each other, not having access to the languages to speak with them becomes ridiculously unreasonable. Add:

Con: Every character would have to wait for an admin to approve it, adding more work for the admins to sort out. Going one step closer to the time when players had to submit a character bio to get in at all.

[somekindofpony]

It would take more time to make a character unique, but character quality would improve.

[Scree]

to be fair, Scree speaks tajaran because I use a tajara as the base for his sprite. Serkii, likewise, uses a tajara as the base for his anthro.

Yes, this results in meowing foxes.

It would be nice to have it not necessarily tied to race.


Also scree speaks gutterband because he's a criminal little shit who loosely associates with the free trade union when he's not on-station, and that's the lingo of criminal shits galaxywide.

[Dhaeleena]

I dunno, i feel like whitelisting languages from all the things that could be whitelisted is weird. And i see arbon's points here.
Dunno, all my characters are Tajara and speak tajara and unathi cuz i dont even understand the origin of the other languages anyways.

[Arbon]

If the goal is added realism, this won't work because it's inherently unrealistic. Assuming that every species would be drastically less intelligent than the modern day, and humans the dumbest of all.
If the goal is to improve play, this won't really do much beyond making people jump through hoops and give more power to anyone with access to a translator. IE: Whoever grabs it first.
If the goal is to improve the quality of characters, this isn't going to change anything at all. Improving the characters means improving the people who play them, and extra restrictions aren't the same as role-playing experience. You can still be a very poor quality, horrible character, while fallowing every rule.

[somekindofpony]

If someone is willing to jump through hoops to have their character speak a certain language, then that means their character at least has thought put into it.

[rikaru19]

Eh, I feel like I'm partially to blame here since Reika can speak vox-pidgin. But then she doesn't entirely remember when she learned it, nor does she use it unless someone is being a twat with languages over comms. Here, have some ear rape ya doofus. Lol.