“Is there a channel or a setting to see only French messages?” A player asks the question on the official French Blizzard forum on November 5 at 2:39 a.m. Paris time, less than three hours after WoW Forever opened. Quotes from French threads are translated from French here. The thread has 51 replies and nearly 2,900 views as of November 7.
The answer comes in two parts. There is no French realm on WoW Forever: Blizzard replaced the realm with a ruleset. The closest thing is a language setting in the options, whose real effect players debate and Blizzard has not settled.
The WoW Forever Preferred Online Language setting: path, cooldown, promise
In its announcement on the WoW Forever rulesets, Blizzard describes the starting choice: Normal, PvP, Roleplaying, Roleplaying PvP, and Hardcore some time after launch. Each ruleset, Blizzard says, “functions more like a broad player ecosystem than a single traditional realm.” None of them is French; our guide to the rulesets details how they differ.
The language is set elsewhere, per account. Blizzard’s path: press Esc to open the game menu, choose Options, then Languages and Social under the System heading, and finally Preferred Online Language. The promise fits in one sentence: players “will also be able to choose a language preference and encounter others who share that preference.” Of the setting, Blizzard writes: “This account-wide setting applies to all characters and has a 24-hour cooldown before it can be changed again.”
| Item | What Blizzard’s page says |
|---|---|
| Path | Esc, Options, System section, Languages and Social |
| Setting name | Preferred Online Language |
| Scope | Whole account, all characters |
| Cooldown before the next change | 24 hours |
| Promise | Encounter others who share that preference |
| Not specified | The mechanism (layers, chat channels), the share of players in each language, any default setting |
So the setting does not create a French server: it is an account preference, applied within the chosen ruleset. On Blizzard’s screenshot, it is separate from the game’s text and audio languages, listed just above.
French by default for English speakers: a player report
On November 5 at 4:07 a.m., an English speaker opens a thread on the European forum, “Check your preferred language!”: “For some reason my preferred language was set to French. I’m not even close to being french. It will affect your layer, so go check if you have been misplaced as well.” A layer is a copy of the world shared by a group of players.
A few hours earlier, at 12:44 a.m., Blizzard had posted a message from Kaivax titled “Language and Social Settings”: “If any of them are not defaulted to your preferred language, you can change them and log out and back in to improve your in-game experience.” The message mentions neither French nor a bug. Below it, a player writes at 2:10 a.m.: “after changing it to English I am layered completely alone!”
To explain this French default, players put forward a cause that Blizzard has neither confirmed nor denied. According to a post on the French forum: “During the stress test, English was missing from the languages offered in Europe. It seems that for players who logged in at that time, their settings stayed on the default language assigned back then.” A testimony dated October 22 at 1:53 a.m. points the same way: a player living in Switzerland writes there that the game offers “almost all languages except English” and that “by default it’s French”.
Reports diverge. On November 5 at 4:25 p.m., an Austrian player says the problem is fixed: “Just logged in and the players around me chatting in my language.” On the evening of the 6th, another writes “English layers are full atm”, while a third, who switched from French to English, sees everyone speaking Dutch. No measurement can tell these accounts apart.
On the French side: English-speaking layers, or French players writing in English
In the thread “Où sont les français ?” (“Where are the French?”), the first replies are tips. One, which collected 14 likes: “Write ‘chocolatine’ in the chat and you’ll get plenty of messages in French, you’ll see!” Another suggests that the server places everyone according to the language they write in: a player theory that Blizzard has not taken up.
Then the tone changes. On November 6 at 11:38 a.m.: “There is a big problem with the system that assigned the default language to players. English speakers are practically all set to French by default.” On a Roleplaying PvP ruleset, another says: “I saw like 2 people speaking French in the chat, that’s all. 90% English speakers.” A third, in the thread “Mega-server and language barrier”, describes a campfire: “I’m on ‘French preference’ for my layer, I go to take the buff, I sit down, three people try to talk, an English speaker, a Russian and a Spaniard.”
Other French players describe the opposite. “Same, my layers are full French,” writes one, then: “Every time people talk in English, then one of them links their quest in French in the chat and we all realize we’re French.” Another: “Personally I meet almost only French players. Who often speak English to avoid being insulted.” Both readings coexist on WoW Forever: English speakers who landed in French-preference layers, or French players who write in English out of habit. No source puts a number on the share of French speakers, and the French threads read contain no reply from Blizzard as of November 7.
Checking your setting, and what Blizzard has not said
The complaint comes back on the group finder side. In “The preferred language is useless in the options”, on November 6 at 11:26 p.m.: “I go into the group finder with the setting on French, nobody (sometimes 1 or 2 French).” The same player then sets everything to English and finds “3 pages of people.” This is a personal observation: Blizzard has not said the setting affects the group finder.
To read your current value, just open Esc, Options, System, Languages and Social. Several players mention an Apply button to confirm, which one of them sees greyed out. Better not to change it just to test: a player, surrounded by English speakers, switched to another language to get back to French, then wrote “you have to wait 24h to change again… here I go for a weekend in German (I don’t speak German of course).”
Some players read their layer from the name of the trade channel: “trade english 43” for one, a “trade channel FR no. 41” for another. Blizzard has not documented that number or its link with language. One player also recommends the “/join fr” command: “quite a lot of French players doing the same thing,” but also French players from the other rulesets. Both leads come from players and have not been verified here.
On Blizzard’s side, the WoW Forever hotfixes of November 6 mention neither language nor layers. The same uncertainty surrounds the empty capitals, covered in our article on empty cities.
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