I can’t recall if Thomas Bates was posting on the forums yet when you left, but if not, their character is the ghost of a knight, and he patrols Duskwood in eternal vigil.
In addition to actually patrolling Duskwood IC with great dedication, Thomasbates the player frequently posted on the forums, particularly when people made threads asking where they could still find walk-up RP, to let people know they were there. After a while, they made a thread. Over time, people started actually going to Duskwood. And, as people started to hear that there was RP to be found in Duskwood, more people went to Duskwood. Now there’s RP pretty much every night in Duskwood. There’s a guild – the Bright Guarde – based there as well; I’m afraid I don’t know at what point in all this they were founded.
It’s a really good study, I think, in how to make RP alive – show up, RP, tell people where they can find you, and don’t stop. The opposite process, meanwhile, was – to my eye – instrumental in the phenomenon of both Stormwind and Silvermoon becoming so quiet.
The population did take an actual hit during BfA, and that contributed to SW and SMC being less crowded than they once were. People noticed that, and some people started commenting on how much emptier they were. This got a little more pronounced through Shadowlands, and after a while, when people asked “what happened” and “where is the RP,” there started being more and more responses stating that Stormwind (and SMC, but especially Stormwind) was “dead,” that WrA RP is “in guilds,” and that “WrA is for Horde, MG is for Alliance.”
So, fewer people went to Stormwind and Silvermoon, because they’d been told those places were dead. Fewer people rolled on WrA for Alliance RP, because they’d been told WrA wasn’t “for” that. With fewer people coming by, Stormwind and Silvermoon got quieter. And even more people said they were dead. And it was harder to argue. And even fewer people went to the cities, and a bunch of people transferred to Moon Guard, and so on, and so forth, in a self-perpetuating cycle.
This is probably simplistic and leaving various factors out (I think the introduction of Warmode was also a problem for Silvermoon; it took a while for it to be common knowledge that it phased you in SMC, even though it didn’t in Org, and by the time people got that, they’d been saying “I can’t find anybody in SMC anymore” for a while), but I really think the perception that SW and SMC weren’t hubs anymore preceded and, in large part, caused their severe drop in activity.
Edit: Another thing that was an issue was the sudden, still-unfixed failure of the /who command. Just so you know, /who is totally broken; for some reason, it can no longer be relied upon to return the names of everyone who’s online in a zone. You can /who a zone with thirty people in it and get five names back; you can /who a guild with fifteen members online and see nobody; you can /who a friend who you know perfectly well is online right this minute because you’re talking to them, and the system will tell you nobody by that name is online right now. I don’t know how many times I saw people ask why there were so few people in SMC or Stormwind, when in fact there were plenty of people, because /who didn’t work and nobody knew it.
