Board Game Arena

Recently I finished overhauling BGA Korean translations which took 3 months, and requested opinion from Korean communities.
Something interesting among what I got was 'alpha translation', which is not possible yet.
I know pre-beta game or English translations are blocked to not repeat past abuses.
However after receiving these opinions from a few seasoned players,
I think allowing translations of alpha games might actually be a good idea to recruit more quality reviewers.

Currently all alpha games must be played in English, whether the localized editions (or unofficially translated quality rulebooks) exist or not.
This effectively forbids players who actually played a game frequently but are not familiar with English from reviewing that game.
For example Res Arcana is officially published in Korean (including expansion!) and received positive feedback,
but many players stay away from or cannot play alpha games due to the language barrier.
Even simpler games like Tichu, Bang!, or No Thanks! are not free from this problem.
Some players just don't like the interface based on unfamiliar language. Sorta... 'allergic to English'?
Although those players might not report bugs themselves, they can tell other players bugs they found out thus helping review process indirectly.

Of course the standards required to translate alpha games should be higher. I propose:

- Qualified as a BGA reviewer
- Played the game at least once
- Got verified at least 100 strings

To prevent early mistranslations being verified with insufficient reviews, alpha translations should never be verified until 1 month after beta transition.
I assume translation of strings edited by developers being automatically removed, and pre-alpha phase exists now.
So instability problem is solved already... maybe?

Thanks for your work on the Korean translation!

Alpha games are games being qualified for beta. The English text is fully part of that qualification process (so that when they occur, translations are done on stable source text). That's why speaking fluent English is a requirement for becoming a reviewer (also, rules being available in other languages than English is not always the case - and never the case in all languages available on BGA - so the English rule is the reference for the qualification process).

A lot of players seem to consider alpha as an early access to games. That's a false perception. The goal of alpha is not to open the game to the general public. Alpha is not beta, it's preparing for beta.

Res Arcana is typical. Players just want early access. We perfectly understand that of course But that's not what we need in alpha. In alpha, we need qualified reviewers able to review the English version of the game and to interact with the developers for reporting bugs and suggestions: speaking fluent English is a strong requirement.

Understood. Thanks for quick response!