Grammar can be an annoying thing. The “Evokers” in World of Warcraft are misnamed everywhere – a poor quest writer at Blizzard must be crying right now.
The “Evokers” are the newest class in World of Warcraft and have been playable for buyers of “Dragonflight” for several days now.
While the launch of the new class went quite solidly overall, some players in the WoW subreddit have noticed a small yet incredibly annoying detail. This could mean that a poor intern at Blizzard will have to work many, many overtime hours…
What did the developers forget? The “mistake” primarily occurs in the English version of World of Warcraft. Although most people in Germany play the German version of the game, globally the English version is probably the most popular – many here in Germany also use the original version for various reasons.
When your character in WoW is addressed in texts, such as from quests or simply the normal “click-text” from NPCs, the NPCs either use your name directly or your class. They say things like:
- “You look like a capable Mage”
- “We don’t like Mages like yourself around here”.
The text is the same for all characters, and only the name of the class is replaced by yours.
The problem is that the “Evoker” in the English version is the only class that begins with a vowel.
A little basic knowledge of English grammar is necessary to understand the mistake.
Since the “Evoker” is called “Evoker” in English, it should therefore always be “an Evoker” in the texts instead of “a Evoker”. Because when a word starts with a pronounced vowel, “an” is used instead of “a”.
Currently, however, all NPCs say texts like in this example:
The correct usage would be “an” instead of “a” – and that in every single dialogue in the entire game.
How can this be fixed? That would be difficult. Because in nearly 20 years, so many quest texts and NPC dialogues have accumulated that several employees would probably take many days to adjust the texts to use the grammatically correct spelling in the corresponding places – if that would even be so “easy” to do.
One suggested alternative would be to simply replace “Evoker” with “Dracthyr” everywhere – but even then, every single quest text would have to be adjusted, as the mention of the class and not the race is hard-coded.
The community is amused and angry at the same time: In the WoW subreddit, the player base reacts with mixed feelings. Some see the problem, as Saldar1234 writes:
“This is a much more complex problem than it appears at first glance, lol. I don’t envy the guys who have to fix this.”
Some are also rather annoyed that this mistake was even pointed out. Turamnab mentions:
“.. why did you have to say that? Now it will annoy me forever.”
Let’s just hope that it doesn’t have to be a “poor little sausage” at Blizzard that has to deal with it. So we will probably have to live with the fact that the “Evokers” will never be addressed grammatically correctly…
