A few months ago, World of Warcraft decided to make a drastic change in their Player vs Player matchmaking system: Russian players would be able to face off against non-Russian players on English realms.
This caused 3 major issues*, one of which was that Russian players use the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't share any letters with the Latin alphabet and is unreadable to most people in Western Europe. this causes communications issues on the English side of the battle, because indicating who to attack is nearly impossible if you can't call them by name. The Russians had a similar issue, but less pronounced since many of them know English from online interaction on English websites, and can at least pronounce them.
What methods can you use to resolve this particular problem?
*The other 2 problems were (still are):
- English realms are a melting pot of cultures, while Russian players are far more coherent, further widening the gap in communication;
- Russian players are more likely to join the matchmaking as an organized group than EN players, leading to a difference in skill level.
Neither of these 2 problems is solved through simple UX changes.