4Game

(Context I am herald with a 10,000 behavior score who plays probably a few months every other year for 5ish years, under 1k games and US East)

I normally play with my friends (90% of my games are played with someone I know IRL.). I just really started solo queuing ranked and I get Spanish/Portuguese/Non-English teammates in about 30% of games. I did not select anything as my second language.

I do not mind losing, but I really hate not being able to communicate. I will still play despite this annoyance, but I am confused that this has persisted over many years.

Why hasn't Valve done something about this? My queue times are really short (under 1 min usually) and the majority of people speak English, but rolling a 1 out of 3 to play with people who can't understand your language sucks. It is not a small issue, my friends seem to have the same issue at higher brackets (their attitude is to treat it like a nerf of your hero and move on, which I get, but jeez. At least it's a positive in how good the game must be for everyone to still play despite the issue),

And, before someone mentions "X% of Americans speak Spanish at home", note that my wording is only about language as a filter, not country.

And, before someone mentions "X emoticon/ping/whatever is translated to all languages" note that, at herald level at least, people just alt-ping everything from "don't go there" to "go there" in the same way. In addition, they literally are speaking Spanish (err or Portuguese?) to each other on the mic! (It's super weird when 2 or more English mic users and 2 or more non-English mic users are clogging up the voice channel. It makes it harder for people of the same language to communicate!

And, before someone mentions, "learn Spanish". Would you say the same thing to someone of a different language about English (say for example, the people in US East games who don't speak English)? If so, you are just an asshole, if not, you are an asshole, but also some sort of linguistic racist/nationalist too.

And, before you say "1,000ms (or X) ping is worse than anything". Remember, 2 out of 3 games I play with English speakers with 25-100ms ping. I'd rather wait longer than play without them.

I am posting this to start a discussion about this. Also, has Valve ever commented on this? All the other posts I find are more framed in a "I'm American, why am I getting Spanish-speaking only teammates?" way, which muddies the real issue with pro and anti Anglo-centric babble. (FYI, writing something intended to be for humor is hard on the internet, so I'll state that the below summary is a joke at the expense of non-post readers, while serving as a pseudo summary.)

​

TLDR: I'm American, why am I getting Spanish-speaking only teammates?