Tell us about your time on Crusader Strike, Aggrend

WoW: Forever World of Warcraft: Forever General Discussion
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I’d love to hear what your actual experience was like. You’ve claimed that there wasn’t really much RP going on. I think it’s important to understand what you were doing on the server while you were there.

What motivated you to roll on the RP-PvP server to begin with?

Did you try to seek out RP while you were there?

Do you have a history of participating in WoW RP?

Did you download TRP and make a profile for your character or even just check out the profiles of other people?

I can remember playing on Grobb myself when I first was curious about RP-PvP and thinking there wasn’t a whole lot going on with RP as I looked around. Then I discovered TRP and the hidden world of RP that is right there in the open once you have it.

It would be a lot easier to respect the decisions being made if there was any sense that you guys have a connection to the RP scene to begin with. Right now it seems like you’re extremely lacking in that area though. You’re promoting this idea that RP-PvP and RP-PvE are joined as a greater RP community and you’re trying to keep it from fracturing. Recognizing the separation between the two feels like the most basic understanding of RP in WoW and the dev team is failing at that.

These are communities that have existed apart from each other for decades and removing one does not mean the other is going to absorb the playerbase. Many of us are going to PvP, many are quitting altogether, and some are going RP-PvE with the express intent of advocating for RP-PvP until it is restored. I think you need to put more thought into what you think you’re trying to accomplish because right now you’re fracturing the community you say you’re trying to preserve.

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That should not be a thing…. I don’t RP, but it would seem instead of an addon RP servers should have the functions built in. A new player wouldn’t know to look for an addon to find RP. They should have a build in RP tool if that’s what it takes.

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I agree. It’s amazing what TRP adds to the experience. It allowed players to set first and last names before Forever added the option, people could create full profiles that listed more detailed character attributes, alignments, guild ranks, RP experience, whether you were currently IC or OOC, write backstories, create notable features that could be imagined as visible by glancing at the character, and on and on. It even lets you flag yourself as an RP player so you can be seen on the world map by other TRP users. And you could immediately tell who was an active RP player just by mousing over them.

I think it would have people flocking to RP rulesets if its features were baseline and not something you had to discover.

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Aggrend really used the “If I don’t see it it doesn’t exist” argument. Also Non-rp players can join both pve and pvp servers out of curiosity.

The only point he made that I liked is that maybe it’s not a good idea to break up rp community in 2 servers. In that case I would make rp server always a pvp one, or with some kind of special pvp ruleset. pvp fits rp more than pve.

edit: clarified it was aggrend

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I didn’t say it doesn’t exist. For all I know Aggrend was a super active RP player and he was disappointed with the RP community not being around to engage with on the scale he was hoping for.

I think it’s perfectly valid to ask these questions of a dev who played on the server though and claims there wasn’t enough RP going on. As I said, I would have come to the same conclusion about Grobb before I found the means to see just how active RP was there.

And frankly, my concern is that he was potentially one of the people who contributed to the flood of non-RP players on the RP-PvP server. Turning around and blaming the RP-PvP community for an issue that he potentially contributed to as a dev is a pretty big red flag that I’d like to be able to rule out.

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You misread, I was saying it was Aggrend who used that argument. He didn’t see RP around, so he says it didn’t exist.

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Oh, my bad. Definitely thought you were directing that at me, haha.

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I would just like to add that the experiences of Crusader Strike RPPVP in no way, shape or form in any even skewed and distorted reality have any meaning to RPPVP for Forever.

Roleplayers invest tremendous amounts of time and money into writing their character, commissioning art, making connections, rising through in-character ranks, etc… Hardly any RPer out there wants to roll on a seasonal server, or annual server like anniversary, especially when it’s just another temporary classic reboot. SoD and Anniversary are not at all appealing to most roleplayers. And that’s without even going into how Crusader Strike in particular was sabotaged from the onset by awful server implementation and advance notice, which resulted in streamers and thousands of people uninterested in the server ruleset rolling there, paired with Blizzard not moderating it.

Even Classic 2019 where they had the “lightning in a bottle” RPPVP server is a pale comparison to Forever. Because many people still didn’t want to do just a reboot of vanilla, no one knew if it’d end at vanilla or how temporary it’d be, so most RPers wouldn’t want to invest in it.

Forever is forever, eternal. It is a version that will be continuously developed that removes ALL of the major problems of retail RP, all the issues with lore, all the nonsense added to the game that breaks immersion. It wipes away two decades of the RP community being neglected. It is astronomically more appealing than even Classic 2019 was.

Then the second misnomer where they seem to consider the RPPVE and RPPVP communities to be the same, when in truth they are just as, if not more, different as Normal and PvP communities are.

The majority of RPPVPers will never play on a PvE realm. I don’t know how they’re under the illusion that RPPVP siphons people away from RP, it doesn’t. It siphons them away from PvP, which is already going to be the vastly more popular ruleset and suffering from the worst bottlenecking, server/layer/shard instability. Siphoning some people off of PvP would be a very good thing for everyone.

Edit Addition: Forgot to mention that SoD also came out in the middle of Classic Wrath of the Lich King, a beloved expansion where Grobbulous, the shining example of RPPVP, was still actively progressing Wrath. … Yeah, gee, I wonder why the RPPVP community wouldn’t just abandon the Classic trilogy then and all migrate to SoD RPPVP, a temporary, seasonal, and experimental version of the game with a short lifespan.

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Couldn’t agree more.

I’m particularly interested in Aggrend’s experience on this though. If it turns out he was another person chasing the megaserver with the streamers it becomes a real black mark against his judgement regarding RP-PvP.

A pretty common phase I’ve heard amongst RP players is something along the lines of “If you’re not finding RP, go out and create some”. I’d really like to know if Aggrend tried to engage with RP or if he just wrote it off because he stayed insulated within a non-RP crowd that flooded the RP-PvP server.

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For sure, I agree, it’d be nice to know. But I think we can assume his experience considering the incredible lack of accuracy in his statement. I’ve been apart of RP communities in WoW for 22 years, his mindset and data are so astoundingly irrelevant that I genuinely still can’t believe that was the real response to the largest thread after a month of silence.

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Yeah, I’m not holding out hope that he’s a prolific RP participant. I’m just leaving space for the possibility that he did try or has some interest and couldn’t connect with the crowd he thought would be present. I’d like to believe that a WoW dev joined the RP-PvP server for a better reason than that’s where the streamer crowd went.