Tencent's Tower of Fantasy appears to have decided to reach out to its players for help translating the game. As you might imagine, this has led the game's fans to question whether or not this was a sound choice for the ToF team to make.
On October 19th, the Tower of Fantasy team posted a dev report via Twitter that not only included questions being answered and in-game issues being acknowledged, but also a "Help Wanted" ad. On the game's official website, the ad reads as follows.
We are looking for Localization Specialists!
Despite how much we would like to improve our localization qualities, we know we still have a lot to work on. Thus, we will be launching the “Localization Specialist” program to enlist players to help us optimize our localization quality (of course, your contribution will be properly compensated with in-game rewards). Please stay tuned for more detail a couple of days after the launch of the 2.0 version.
While this seems like a pretty cool job to take, fans seem to agree it should be just that: a job. Rather than offering fair compensation to those who put the work into translation, publisher Level Infinite, which is a Tencent subsidiary, has apparently decided in-game currency is the best compensation for the job. This request from the company has raised a lot of red flags among its fans, mainly because fans believe the job is being pawned off to players rather than a well-trained and capable employee, which leaves room for several issues in the future.
Kara Dennison, also known as @RubyCosmos on Twitter, went as far as to post their thoughts about the studio's choice. They state not only were they underpaid for their work at Tencent Studios, but that the company is creating a "new low in an industry that’s already in a race to the bottom".
This looks to be another odd choice for Tencent after the studio recently laid off almost its entire staff at gaming website Fanbyte back in September. That decision came after Tencent laid off 5% of its workforce the quarter before the Fanbyte layoff. These layoffs were handled very poorly, with the company laying employees off one by one over several hours at a snail's pace.
Sadly, this kind of thing seems to be a trend as of late, as The Day Before devs reached out to fans asking for "volunteers" to help them finish their game before release back in June. Now, again, this seems like a sweet deal, until you learn that the devs were dead set on this being volunteer work, which would mean no compensation would be provided to these people helping Fntastic finish their game.
Techraptor has reached out to the Tower of Fantasy team to confirm this story, and we'll let you know if we hear back from them.
