Apparently WoW wants to know how involved you are with RP. They posted a poll on X (Twitter) 5 hours ago. Go tell them.
For anyone wondering, I’m sure the poll has to do with Blizz making the decision to close Lava Lash and send the PvE-RPers to either an RP-PvP realm or a regular PVE realm. There’s a lovely post about it here:
So before they get it in their heads that there are not enough RPers anywhere else, I feel like we should spam this poll, comment on the thread even if we’re not on LL and make sure that Blizz knows how involved we are.
(btw, I’ve now somehow lost another rank on the forums so I can’t post back to back anymore. That’s fine, Blizz. I can edit.
Posted on my Lava Lash character to decry this silly idea that people need to be surrounded by players at all times to be happy. Low and high pop servers are preferences, and also fluctuating constantly with how Blizzard has split up the playerbase among so many different versions of WoW.
I just logged into LL and it had people all over Trade District. There are currently more than 50 in SW - that’s more than a lot of retail realms have.
I just don’t see why this is necessary. If people were happy, let them be. It sounds like the real problem has to do with raiding, not RP. This just makes me sad.
I wanted to play on SoD but my work hours have picked up so much that I don’t have enough free time for any Classic plus Retail.
I don’t disagree with anything that you said, but you also have to remember that there is a new sheriff in town. I have no idea what the P&L is for a low-pop server, but I would bet my Elite Tauren Chieftain tickets that MS isn’t a fan of anything that doesn’t at least pay for itself.
I don’t know. I think it’s a pretty healthy representation that there’s still plenty of people who RP in some manner in WoW.
RPers have always been the minority since this game had released and I’m fine with that. But the polling does suggest at least 40% (combining the three categories vs the non RP option) feel compelled to RP in this game in some manner or another. That’s a healthy indicator that an audience is there–even if they aren’t 100% hard core about it like the rest of us.
But I also wonder how much of the lack of participation is split among how many different platforms the poll is on in addition to people who just don’t track WoW on social platforms. If I didn’t start doing so recently I would have never noticed any of this being discussed despite being an WrA veteran since Cata and lurking the forms religiously.
I don’t post on X/Twitter, I don’t post on YT or any other social media thing. I’ve been on WRA since 2009 and didn’t even start using the forums until a few yrs ago.
If they are using X/T or YT for measurables, good luck.
Yeah I work -in- media and I didn’t start actually subscribing to the official WoW
social platforms until a few months ago. And I can imagine there’s a massive portion of the player base that isn’t as engaged online or on those profiles but still participate on RP servers or would love to see more RP related content.
Blizzard has been on a role giving more tools for RPers to play the game they’ve (almost) always wanted. Mogs, toys, customization options, etc. I hope the poll and the shuttering of servers isn’t a hint of a pivot in another direction.
Given they can easily pull population numbers for realms on their end of things, I doubt they’re using the polls as a determining factor for decisions regarding stuff they’re implementing or to shutter/merge servers. Not to mention the swathes of social media and forum posts regarding RP events and activities that can be found rather easily. It could potentially be because they’re trying to determine what social media content might engage the most users on each platform, but who knows. The WoW Twitter did a slight shift in post content when DF came out that, I think, saw it see more engagement, so they could be trying to improve numbers further.
I don’t do Twitter. I’ve tried it a couple of times but it doesn’t hold my interest.
I’m not the one who originally noticed the poll. Nos from Convocation of Darkness posted it on Discord (thank you!) and seeing it set off all sorts of WTF in my head because I couldn’t imagine why Blizz would be asking about RP. I’m sure they know their populations on RP servers. Either way, I found it concerning because why would they be putting up the poll if there wasn’t a reason.
Then I saw that Maerlyn had posted on Discord about Lava Lash (also thank you!).
What I hope is that the poll is some theater while they sort out the mess they just made in Classic. I feel like they won’t designate another RP realm in Classic, SOD or any other specials they do in the future if the poll doesn’t return good numbers (not that the poll was a particularly good one tbh).
What it also could be is a question that they’re asking so they have the “results” to say, “We’ve decided to merge all the retail RP realms” while they also look at a possible retail PVE realm merger (I feel like both would need to happen if they tried to solely merge RP realms). While I don’t think this is coming, I could be wrong.
Yeah the poll says 40%, it’s probably far less. I contributed but there will be all sorts of math involved in extracting value from those polls. It won’t be like “oh, it’s actually 40%!” on their end.
I wonder why they put this poll out where they did. Surely there is data they already had that could give them a more accurate metric on RP engagement.
Like, for example, how many people have downloaded TRP3, or MAUs for different RP realms
