Oof. What’s wrong with doggo? I do animal rescue so I’ve been there so many times.
Also, no need to chat about the forums about it, can always Discord and be an ear.
Also, been RPing in Mereldar tonight throughout all the chat. I don’t want it to be the only hub of the server, but we have a good thing going here and we can continue here and keep pushing the efforts elsewhere.
Heyo, former GM of the Order of the Lynx-- sadly life got in the way and holy heck running a guild is harder than I anticipated now that I’m not a bored college student.
The system you’re referring to (and I’m surprised to see it mentioned at all) is a modified version of a system my wife and I made for a SWTOR RP community. Said community is RP-PVP (but like, no actual in-game pvp combat. It’s all DICE BATTLES BAYBEE).
So because of this, it required a means to quantify power beyond just physical or magical might. Darth Bigtusk says he has eight billion ships and forty planets, but like-- prove it or else I don’t wanna fight you.
It was basically a 4x strategy game. I still have the docs and sheet-generator for the SWTOR version but never had the time to fully make a sheet generator for the WoW version (streamlined/star wars references removed).
Anyway, Conquest is alright if you’re looking for mass group RP. For smaller groups, go with whatever works for your folks best imo.
Word is mouth is great. To some extent Blizzard also needs to improve it’s absolutely horrendous in-game community feature. For an MMO, the sheer lack of use people can get out of that thing is astounding. Most stuff I’ve found is cause I lurk in a lot of Discords, but that can’t be expected of the average player, and for good reason. At current count I’m at 33 WoW related Discords. I can only semi-manage because I’m a college student whose schooling and job involves computers 100% of the time.
Maybe we can bully blizz into improving in game communities? 
Idk
Mood. I recently went from working full time to student-ing full time, and while the time commitment can be similar or more, I still have so much more energy and free time (somehow) to do other things.
I’m actually still semi-involved in SWTOR things, so I bring it up more often. I met (and continue to meet) a lot of cool people and systems over there, though it’s nowhere near as active as the WoW scene. I just happen to have a character whose focus is large scale trading in WoW, while my current SWTOR main does large scale military operations, so these kinds of systems popping up is something I keep track of.
Alas, so much gets in the way of pretending to be weird creatures on the internet. And it’s really hard to find that balance between freeform and putting a number on something.
WoW communities are dollar store discord servers and their implementation royally screwed up guild permissions and the ability to fine tune rank permissions for, literally no reason.
Also there is apparently voice chat in game? I just discovered that and can only assume it was added with communities.
It’s been there for ages, I think. It’s just never used because because the thought of actually hearing the voice of the kind of randos everyone meets in game fills everyone with well deserved dread.
The problem I’m having with Discord(s) atm is that they all track the same events and my eyes glaze over. They also may or may not track the exact same events, and I cba’d to check every single one.
The one I like the most so far is the setup The Society Circle has -
https://tinyurl.com/ItsTheSocietyCircleCalendar
Although it gets a bit cluttered since it has a lot of weekly stuff repeated. The Discord also posts a ‘stuff happening in the next seven days’ type list.
I will be real I have probably noticed the voice chat in game before but I have memory issues which make retention difficult for me. I have had to ask my friends for confirmations of things I am sure they have told me a dozen times before.
The ad spam in discord is a consequence I think of the community being so small, all these discords overlap and many people from one community filter into all the others with varying degrees of activity outside their own main community.
I think it kinda is the best solution, as long as those ads are maintained. If any of them are out of date; that needs to be addressed. It’s like those two stickies on this forum, they are both so old as to be irrelevant at this point and only adds to the appearance of server death and slowness.
I just went to search on this and found a post about The Society Circle on MG but not on WrA. It didn’t appear on our search so I literally rolled back to Oct. 2023 to see if we had one. I didn’t see anything.
But, the description on the MG post says: The Society Circle, the premier hub that encompasses all things related to MG and WrA. No matter which faction or community group you belong to, our vibrant community welcomes you with open arms.
This is what I’m talking about with advertising. This is the first I remember hearing about this Discord. I’m on the forums pretty regularly and can’t recall seeing it. A new RPer certainly isn’t going to find it.
I’ll go look at the Discord and see how it shapes up to the ones we have here.
Edit: Ok, I looked at it. If our people are already finding WCP too extensive, I guarantee you they won’t like Society Circle. It’s got an almost overwhelming number of channels. If I was going to use it, I’d have to mute and remove/unfollow about half the Discord.
Its layout is fine. WCP and WrA-RP are both similar. But I feel like our Discords are both much more functional just because we’re not innundated with things that don’t matter to us.
Fun thing! From a backend point of view, there are a lot of calls in the API that refer to incomplete functions such as clubs, streams in said clubs, and tickets to get into said streams. Whatever was planned for in-game communities was definitely bigger than what we ended up getting and frankly, IG Communuties have been Blizz abandonware for some time.
I love the idea though and tried to use them so many times for different projects, but the chat function — it’s main reason to exist — is just so fundamentally broken that I also abandoned them. I’ve no idea if Blizzard intends to pick up where they left off or make something new but IG Communites as they are are just untenable.
Well like I was telling you in DMs, we’ve had a lot of success recently with FLAK and a very active group in our in game community.
Might be worth taking a poke at again, because its def an immediate location to say “hey im going here to RP, if anyone wants to swing by” etc. etc.
(I also try to remind people they need to make sure its still added to their chat window often, and to change it to a color that stands out.)
My only issue with the in-game community function is that I have to join it on every one of my alts.
I’m in a couple of communities and there’s no activity for days. Then someone will post a single line, but I won’t see it because I’m on a new alt. And no one answers them. By the time I see it, 3-4 days have passed.
Having one for cross-server and cross faction guild invites is handy, though.
What could have been…
I got my candle shoulders and I am now ready to RP as an O’SHA Inspector. If you see me feel free to report any O’SHA violations to me.
I got my work cut out for me in the Ringing Deeps.
In this vein, it also has character caps, though I don’t know what those are off hand anymore.
You guys really are the exception to the rule and I mean it. It could be a model worth looking into but we should also determine if part of its success is the immediate urgency of PvP. RP doesn’t quite have that competitive urgency that PvP does. But who knows, maybe it could work.
As you know though, I have heavy bias with IGCs from how janky they are and how annoying it is to remind folks to keep re-adding it to chat.
And there’s that, too. Roleplayers are going to bring in a lot more alts.
I’m down to experiment but I’m not really certain if IGCs are going to blow our socks off. I wonder instead if it’s better to just use every other means possible to get the word out about RP.
Semi-related, to get the word out for Mereldar, I post a @NowRP tag in the WCP, usually whip up a #lfrp post in the WrA-D (though I do sometimes forget), ping @WoW-LFRP my guild, bump the forum post, and advertise it in Hallowfall General throughout the session*. Sometimes, you get 20 people and sometimes, you get 3. While a smaller turnout can be a bit of a bummer, the key is keep going at it and we’re slowly but surely building a trend. We just need to keep it going and word-of-mouth is deeply appreciated. Same will go for any other hubs we try and build up.
(* This is the one instance I will unironically say that I wish Mereldar had Trade Chat.)
We could at the least create a bnet community for guild masters and event runners etc, to be able to ping each other in?
(Bnet because it’s account wide and you can see the messages from mobile app/launcher as well)
It’s 1k and counts each alt towards that cap 
If you can fill that, even with alts, of ACTIVE players, that’s a feat in itself.
Do you want a safety briefing? This is how you get a safety briefing.
That could work. Or add glead to event coordinator on WCP Discord and give it a private channel.
I just like having somewhere in game to get messages too. Because when I’m playing I often don’t check discord.
We actually had a Bnet community for WCP for over a year, and it was just something that was-… Well. The Bnet community platform just pales in comparison to what you can use discord for, so even if we joined the Bnet community, it was more insightful and useful to use the discord.