America is pretty unique in having almost everyone speak English, I suspect the China region benefits from the same thing. Europe however has very scattered languages and is often also merged with middle east players these days too. The range of languages is huge and even if someone can understand English in text that doesn’t mean that they have confidence or ability to speak it clearly, on top of that you have english second language speakers trying to speak english to other english second language speakers with completely different accents based on their home country. It’s a mess. So most just don’t have the confidence to use voice chat and instead default to groups and ping features.

The growth of ping features in shooters has made them enormously more accessible for communication. They are genuinely the best addition to games in the last 10 years and something that should always be expanded upon post-release but rarely ever is. It’s not just a language thing too, it’s an accessibility problem, an anxiety problem, a gender problem and so many more things.

I tried Battlefront 2 and found I hated it because of the lack of a map. Whoever had the idea not to have a map key is a fool.