It is true that English is almost nowhere to be found in “Star Rail”. Even the “Bloom” option in the Traditional Chinese settings becomes “泛光效果” in the Simplified Chinese settings. (Figures 1, 2)
Some alphabetic characters can be seen in the world, mobile phone menus, and combat interface. However, these characters are not real foreign languages, but English letters with replaced symbols. In fact, they are all English, but the game does not show how the “Star Rail language” expresses the game background. For example, two places where cultural exchange has been interrupted for a long time are using the same “Star Rail language”…
I wrote before about 《Artificial Languages in Games and Their Reasons》. Usually, it is to add immersion, but with the game “Star Rail”, I think the reasons for artificial languages can be expanded, that is, to avoid “Game Ban on Foreign Languages“, because the visual difference brought by changing to English is not that great.
On April 27, 2023, the login window of QQ Mail web page was found to contain micro color difference text watermarks.
From the source code, the text is related to Cookie, so this is a means of tracking users. The function name hiraishinNoJutsuShiki is quite interesting, it should be a ninjutsu in Naruto: 飛雷神の術式 (Hiraishin No Jutsu-Shiki).
However, this kind of watermark is usually placed on the content pages of UGC platforms, such as articles and videos, etc. Placing it on the login interface does not seem to have any obvious effect. Some say that it is to “crack down on malicious programs that cover QR codes and steal accounts”, but mobile phone cameras are almost impossible to distinguish this content, and “scan to login” theoretically does not upload the captured images, it only calls the local image recognition tool to obtain the content of the QR code.
So it is impossible to determine the role of this watermark. It may have been added as a test for other pages. It seems to be more advanced than the previous color difference watermarks of manufacturers. Internet Archive can’t save it, and the global font shadow can’t make it visible.
If you want to discover such color difference watermarks, the principle is usually to adjust the contrast, and there are also tools to remap colors. Even if the two colors are very close, they will be mapped to obvious differences in color coordinates.
From April 23 to 25, 2023, many Android users who pre-loaded “Honkai: Star Rail” reported receiving calls from the “Anti-Telecom and Online Fraud Center”. The following table is a compilation of information shared by players (perhaps thanks to the “Display User IP Location Information“, which provided some convenience for collecting locations). The table includes the source of the game, whether an anti-fraud app is installed, geographical location, and whether the police visited in person:
Name
Game Source
Anti-Fraud App
Location
Visit
AIChannel China Kizuna Ai
Unknown
Unknown
Chongqing (Maybe)
None
UID:61219897
taptap
Yes
Unknown
Yes
Friend of UID:60620759
Unknown
Unknown
Guangzhou
None
Lumia-Clover
Unknown
Unknown
Guangdong
None
Ye Chuning
Unknown
No
Guangdong
None
Wei Wei One
Unknown
Unknown
Guangdong
None
Pineapple Fried Ginger
Unknown
Unknown
Hefei
None
Shan Shan Jinhui
Unknown
No
Tianjin
None
Silly Fish ouo is
Unknown
Unknown
Guangdong
None
Acer Maple Yingquan
Unknown
Unknown
Guangdong
None
Will Hold Stupid Kotsuji’s Hand
taptap
Unknown
Guangdong
None
Yokohama F4 Saiko
taptap
Unknown
Guangdong
None
Little Master This Master
Unknown
Unknown
Hunan
None
Star’s Extreme Ice Blackberry
Unknown
Unknown
Guangdong
None
It can be found that:
There seems to be no Bilibili channel server in the game source, only the official server is clear.
You will also receive a call without an anti-fraud app.
The geographical locations of players are relatively concentrated, mainly in Guangdong, but not more than 80%.
Only one player was visited.
Some speculate that this is a deliberate commercial calculation, but considering that the “Anti-Fraud System” has also made mistakes in the past, perhaps this is another accident. The following are past errors of the “Anti-Fraud System”:
At the end of 2020, Microsoft’s short domain service aka.ms was subjected to DNS pollution in Hubei Telecom because the Provincial Public Security Department’s anti-fraud department submitted a list of fraudulent websites to the regulatory bureau, and the regulatory bureau required mandatory implementation.
From April to early May 2021, three Cool An users claimed that after installing ID Photo, the local “Anti-Fraud System” quickly called the person concerned and asked them to uninstall the software.
On December 24, 2021, iFLYTEK Note stated: The reason for the recent abnormal network service is that the National Anti-Fraud Center mistakenly banned the domain name, and after verification, it has notified various places to unblock it successively.
The “Anti-Fraud System” is a kind of infrastructure, and another kind of infrastructure, the time server, also often has problems, but the problems about this time server are all small news, and there is no clear accident report to explain the specific error principle, even if it leads to the failure of the mobile phone to scan the code to enter the subway ticket gate machine, so I speculate that negative reports about “infrastructure” have stricter censorship, but the disadvantage is that once an abnormality occurs, it is not easy to consider the option of accidental errors, because the purpose of censorship is to create a perfect, error-free “infrastructure”.
Source: twitter.com多个时间的「北京城市轨道交通线网图」图片Source: zhuanlan.zhihu.com，NaL – Central Go 创作（知乎账户 James Liuzh）的北京轨道交通英文站名变化表格根据 NaL – Central Go 的表格，摘录部分 2023年4月21日 照片里的站点数据
On April 21, 2023, someone discovered that the English names of Beijing subway stations had been modified again. Among them, “Fengtai Zhan (Fengtai Railway Station)” of 「丰台站」 was changed to “Fengtai Railway Station”, and 「首经贸」 also changed from “Shoujingmao (Capital Univ. of Economics and Business)” to “Capital Univ. of Economics and Business”.
However, this modification can be traced back to January 6, 2023 on the 「北京城市轨道交通线网图」 on Beijing’s official website, and the earlier ɑ writing was also changed to a.
However, material replacement may have lags and other reasons, so some modifications can be discovered now. This must be a brain-burning decryption game.
If you want to conduct research, you need to prepare pictures of the 「北京城市轨道交通线网图」 at various times. It is best to obtain first-hand information from the subway, but even so, it is difficult to make perfect reasoning, because the aspects to which the building belongs theoretically have the right to name, including foreign languages. If this is some kind of detective game, then this must be an unusually brain-burning decryption game, because it requires collecting and organizing a lot of information.
On June 28, 2016, “Mobile Game Thing” published an article by Xu Huanzhong, who used to work in R&D and publishing, introducing some experiences in obtaining game licenses. One of the experiences was that “English and traditional Chinese characters cannot appear in domestic games, and simplified Chinese names must be used”. However, no one took this experience seriously at this time.
On July 6, 2016, many game developers stated that the new mobile game regulations implemented on July 1 would strictly restrict non-decorative English characters in games. Among them, the review opinions of games that failed to pass the review stated: “The game combat interface and help interface use non-decorative English such as “SP”, “HP”, “RingOut”. It is recommended that the game company modify it to simplified Chinese fonts in accordance with relevant national text publishing regulations.” Moreover, this suggestion was the first in the review opinion.
In addition, some practitioners said that “AUTO” for automatic combat, “level up” for upgrade prompts, “mission start”, “missin complete” to indicate the start and completion of tasks, the “warning” icon before arriving at the Boss room, the prompt “GO” to indicate forward, “new” to indicate new props, and even “x” in “prop x1” indicating the number of items were all in their game’s review opinions.
On July 7, 2016, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio and Television gave an explanation for the news that “foreign languages are prohibited in games”, saying that it would not be a one-size-fits-all approach, but the allowed example given was “For example, in racing games, the abbreviation POR appears on the body of a Porsche car, and we will not require it to be changed to the Chinese ‘保时捷'”, only clearly allowing decorative text.
These are screenshots circulated in the news at the time. The original source should be Sina Weibo.
It is relatively difficult to collect specific games that replaced English with Chinese during updates, or games that did excessive localization when the server was launched. Currently, I have only collected:
On September 22, 2016, NetEase, the operator of 《乖离性百万亚瑟王》 (《乖離性百萬亞瑟王》, Kakusansei Million Arthur), stated that it had received a request in June, so it would modify all English to Chinese.
In March 2017, the Bilibili server of 《命运-冠位指定》 (《命運-冠位指定》, Fate/Grand Order) changed the original English class names to Chinese.
On December 18, 2019, many weapon names in 《元气骑士》 (Soul Knight) were changed to Chinese.
From September to October 2021, the Bilibili server of 《公主连结 Re:Dive》 (Princess Connect! Re:Dive) changed most of the English to Chinese.
On October 27, 2022, the Tencent pioneer server of 《地下城与勇士》 (Dungeon & Fighter) began to change the original English parts to Chinese characters.
On March 31, 2023, 《蔚蓝档案》 (Blue Archive) Mainland China server released its first promotional video, in which the Japanese “止まれ” on the road surface became the Chinese “停车”, even though this was decorative text.
Because of the openness of BitTorrent, the subscription function of BitTorrent is directly implemented using RSS, which usually also supports functions such as character matching, such as qBittorrent’s “RSS Smart Episode Filter” function, and then you can automatically download the latest episode of the anime you need.
In early April 2023, “Fan Shi”, a well-known animation UP master in Bilibili’s animation section, shared the skills of using BitTorrent and RSS to subscribe to anime in the live broadcast. He mainly played the video “How to Automatically Follow Anime with qBittorrent”, which was how the past decade went. Then on April 9, the clip “[Fan Shi] Fan Shi Teaches You How to Automatically Download New Anime!!!” was uploaded, and then renamed to “[Fan Shi] The Introduction of New Anime Has Been Greatly Reduced!? How Should I Watch Anime in the Future??” for unknown reasons.
Starting on April 20, 2023, multiple Chinese BitTorrent websites were blocked by the GFW: mikanani.me acg.rip bangumi.moe miobt.com
In response, some people believe that Fan Shi’s promotion is related to the blocking of BT sites, and some people even vent their anger on Fan Shi. I think the direction is wrong, just like someone goes to GitHub to accuse some repositories that may cause GitHub to be blocked by the GFW, they have mistaken the culprit. Even for the “thieves” of 《Resident Evil 4 Remake》, I think the culprit is this complex review rule.
