Main issue is that its a lot of work, thats why most of these collective TL efforts die. Learning it, downloading all the required things. Troubleshooting... then there are probably different versions. Different tools... so you dont really get a unified TL anyway.
Mtool works like an easy to use app. You just click 3 buttons and voila, you got a pretty damn decent translation. And its also pretty damn cheap (you want deepseek, so lvl 1 sub is enough). I dont know, maybe some people really are struggling to pay for bread. In that case yeah, you gotta work for it. But for most general users, mtool is the way.
I appreciate that Americans and Europeans who play mostly or exclusively RPGM games can prefer MTool or stick to it for its ease/convenience of use like quickly running only MTool, embedded translations, translation of all content - menus, stats etc., if you have access to a better translation engine there. Even though now I don't think there is that pro of faster translation with Deepseek as it has to generate it as-you-go, or will take considerable time to pre-translate. (I only ever used Google or Bing and it was pre-translating rather fast. But that's from an era when translations could be shared. Don't know about now.)
3$ has to be just a cup of coffee nowadays in the US or Europe, but for some it might be a day's worth of food. And I'm not sure if you can abuse it for a month for your 3$ or do you have to pay for tokens on top of that. For me personally, for example, there is just an issue of technically paying for it in the first place as I doubt the guy will accept my MIR card.
Luna's more of a hassle to set it up initially, but you can run it pretty comfortably afterwards. It's just you'll need two pieces of software to run a local model and Luna, or just Luna if you want online translation. Games are in your library with icons there, you run them, they get hooked and translated automatically after the first time with the translator of your choice. So I really don't get the point about it being more cumbersome to run than MTool. Yeah you'd better tweak a prompt some when you finish one game and start another, not sure if you can do it with MTool at all for AI translations, but it pays off in a way of better quality translation. Even in case you run a local model, it's two pieces Luna + something like Kobold or LM Studio. A couple or two years back people used Textractor + Sugoi server combo and were OK with that.
'But for most general users, mtool is the way'... Guess it's quite the opposite when it comes to the cases where people play both RPGM and VNs, or actually mostly or exclusively VNs, as is my case, cause MTool will do just fucking nothing with VNs or most of them, at least. And apart from Luna working with variety of engines cause it just hooks text I can only repeat that there are so much more translation options and options in general (available freely), so I can't agree with the statement about Mtool being the way for general users, unless you mean with 'geneneral users' those who are looking to play strictly RPGM games.
Overall... Sad. That people are lazy to install/explore or scared away by Luna (yes, it's somewhwat more complex to set up and run, but it's inherent feature of more powerful and sophisticated things, is it?) and would pour gold onto the greedy fuck developing an overall infinitely inferior translation tool (again, MTool might be convenient for quickly translating RPGMs, but it just lacks the flexibility, power and scope in comparison with Luna), who totally locked the possibilty to share translations and locked any reasonable translation engine behind a paywall. For fuck's sake, there is no other option apart from Bing freely available now, not even Google, is it? Now look at this:
And it's kind of total facepalm when people fail to understand Luna's functionality and that the translation can be embedded in pretty much all RPGM games as far as I understand, like
here, so they stick to/promote MTool. Don't get why you have to look at the both windows in the first place, BTW. Tried to run this frog game. Embeds alright. But to be frank, I couldn't get yet how to make it break lines properly or if it's doable at all.
