Lately, I’ve been noticing there are two* kinds of people who roleplay: Those that observe the Stormwind Law Project (SLP) and those who hate it and/or don’t observe it.
My question is, why the hate? Did something happen that caused everyone to hate it? And if so, what?
*At least two, there are some people like myself who are neutral towards it.
I think it boils down to this:
The SLP makes use of quite a bit of headcanon that doesn’t necessarily jive with the way every individual thinks the IC universe is supposed to work. People in this camp may feel that SLP is imposing situations/circumstances/rules upon them that they do not agree with. In addition, some detractors may have issues with participants/leaders or even see some of the conflict that inevitably arises from such a large group project as being undesirable and not worth it.
On the other hand, there are people who enjoy the sense of storytelling, continuity, cohesion, and character development that a large project like SLP tries to bring about. People in this camp likely at least have some level of appreciation for the headcanon implemented to fill in the various gaps left by our IC world in order to make everything function and see it as a welcome structure rather than an imposition.
I think that’s probably as succinct as I can be while remaining rather general. There are absolutely others out there like you who are neutral about it. I tend to be in that camp myself, seeing both the positives and negatives of the project and accepting that my viewpoint doesn’t have to be so black or white. You probably just hear about the neutral point of view so much less because people who don’t have strong feelings one way or the other don’t tend to be as vocal as those who do.
For me it was mostly just bad experiences. I don’t have anything against most of the people in SLP and I am always in favour of more people working together. However, it is natural in any community that cliques form and they were quite prevalent, causing a very strong tribe mentality in many debates and problems. Additionally, I found that, as a guard anyway, a lot of the laws that were being proposed weren’t really doing anything. People would bring in ammendments to slightly change wording or introduce new taxes, but never anything that really impacted law enforcement, though I do grant I’m only looking in the lens of a guard.
Additionally, some of the people in the community treated me poorly. Often, positions in the community seemed to stoke ego and they would try to walk over me. I had a particularly unpleasant experience when someone walked into my own meeting, didn’t like what I was discussing, and tried to dismiss the meeting entirely. I won’t name names of course and I’d like to stress that everyone else is just wonderful people, but it definitely impacted how much I really wanted to be involved in the project.
SLP has the potential, and at times, has been fun, but you gotta be careful and remember that just like any projects, it has good and bad people and has flaws in it. Additionally, you have to go into it understanding that these are the interpretations of lore that you subscribe to. Don’t go into it expecting people to have the same identity of Stormwind as you. I.E. don’t go in expecting it to be feudal when in many respects it’s actually Victorian.
Drama and elitist attitudes.
I’ll bite.
I was in SLP a few years ago, and it wasn’t really my scene but my guild at the time was big into it and there was little RP to be found outside of our participation with the project. Eventually it got to a point where I was just social in it, didn’t really participate, whatever. I said some edgy things here and there, because yeah, I’ll admit I could be a giant jerk back then, so it doesn’t really surprise anyone when I say that I got banned from the project for being a jerk.
The circumstances of that ban, however, were extremely questionable. I was banned for six months with a threat from some moderators to ban me for life, which I took issue with because I felt six months was extreme - and the life ban even more extreme. Also, I’d gotten zero warnings or talking to’s beforehand with the moderators, something which I brought up consistently but was ignored profusely. I brought up examples of other people who had done similar things as I had, and the moderators told me that none of those people would be banned - at best they’d be given a warning.
My most poignant protest was that just a couple months before this incident, there was someone saying obtusely racist remarks in the SLP discord who only got banned for four weeks. I argued that me being a jerk didn’t warrant a six month ban while being a blatant racist only constituted four weeks, but that fell onto deaf ears as well. So, it became quite clear to me that I was being singled out by the moderator team, even though I hadn’t done a single thing to them save for being in past conflict with a few of them for other reasons.
And that’s what did me in: personal bias. There was no objective way of looking at my situation and how it compared to other situations. They wanted me gone, with zero protests and zero way of changing their minds. I eventually managed to argue my way into a compromise of sorts where the six months was reduced to two months, which I still found absurd given that racism, as established, would only be punishable by up to four weeks, but the case was closed.
EDIT: I should also point out that the moderation team was working off of false allegations made by someone against me that were thoroughly debunked with hard proof, but they still went ahead and treated me like as if I had done what was alleged anyway. Those allegations are still talked about sometimes as a ‘bad thing I did’ to this day, even though the project lead himself said that it was false. Food for thought on that one.
Now, that’s just my personal tangent, but I’ve spoken to many others who feel as though they’ve been wrongly persecuted against by the SLP’s moderation team - i.e. thrown into the same situation as I where they weren’t given any warnings and were just permanently banned out of the blue for flimsy reasons. And this is where a huge problem lies: from every which way I can tell, the ones running the project are far more concerned with fulfilling their own personal crusades and statuses rather than doing any actual objective moderation work. It does not help that the leader of the project often just picks guild leaders and officers to be moderators without knowing their actual credentials and how they behave in that position of power.
Now, moving away from my personal side of things, in the past couple of years there has been a few questionable things the SLP has done that I personally have issue with, which include:
I’ll also go ahead and say as another point that the SLP attracts a lot of people who self-insert their character and want to gain as much power as they can, both through IC and OOC means. It’s the classic story of man wanting power wherever it may rest, and there are many within the project who have invalidated the golden rule of keeping IC and OOC separate in the pursuit of obtaining more influence, at the cost of making up things about opposition or straight up blackmail if some rumors are to be believed. An environment like that can be extremely toxic, and I’ve known quite a lot of people who didn’t get in trouble with the project who just simply left it for that very reason: getting away from the power chasing drama mongers. The moderator team does little to quell these attitudes (especially as some of them have been guilty of the same behavior).
I’ve raised quite a lot of these concerns over both discord and tumblr over a while and been met with a lot of hostile attitudes from the SLP in response, some of which have been downright nasty and rude, which really only makes me double down in my criticism and being vocal about it. I and others wouldn’t resort to public criticism if our concerns had been heard and we’d been treated fairly, but the SLP has no motivation to do as much, and condemns us all for having even the slightest critique.
It’s quite sad, because otherwise, I would have supported the project full-heartedly and been delighted for such a thing to be a staple on the server. I don’t condemn the SLP as a whole so much as I condemn the ones running it both through moderation and the overall planning. I have great respect for the people who are putting in the work to make the content they want with others to better the project, as they genuinely believe in its message and want to make certain facets of a medieval society more easy to RP with. It’s just a shame that the moderation can often get in the way of other people enjoying it for the most pettiest of reasons.
Anyway, rant over. See y’all on that secrets page.
Hah! This thread is going to go well in about 80 posts.
It boils down to a popularity contest, imo. MG has always been an OC popularity contest and if someone’s character is getting more attention, pretend power, and popularity over another or they’re not in that “clique” of [x] popular roleplayer at the time, then it’s the petty olympics for everyone. I don’t really participate in the SLP, but I’m neither for it or against, and tbh a lot of the drama that breaks out in it is pretty funny to me. It’s all RP, but a lot of people take their “playing pretend” extremely seriously and begin to mix IC and OOC a lot for whatever reason why. I’ve stopped trying to understand RPers reasons for the ridiculous stuff they do OOCly relating to IC things.
By posting on an off server alt, OP, I’m betting you’re well aware of some of the issues.
You’re either a part of the project/affiliated and baiting or you’re hoping to stir the pot but not reflect badly on your MG main or guild.
Just stop.
because it sucks dees nuuts, haha gadem, finna dab. but for real, for an idea of trying to keep server and wow lore together they sure as heck do a pretty crap job bout it. your better off just not giving them the time of day.
they suck nuts too \dab
Not defending OP here, but you do realize that hes posting on an off server alt because MG is all about the OOC reputation.
This is literally high school KEKW
Not selling you or some of the other posters here that short.
But yes. There are some maturity challenged people around and some of them are a part of that project or want to be a part of events that the organizers sponsor. FOMO is real for some I guess that they’re gonna be blacklisted if they dare to speak out. Mean Girls of Moon Guard.
I wouldn’t worry about the OP though.
They’ve done this before. Pot stirring is kinda their thing.
I notice it more in certain Moon Guard communities but it is quite prevalent among the entire server that it’s all about face value interactions like spreading hugs and kisses xoxo bs in public while backstabbing behavior ensue.
Just imagine OP secretly being an SLP admin and taking notes on who’s saying what in this thread LOL
But for real tho, even if this thread is bait, it doesn’t matter to me, seems that this thread could get interesting soon.
And people mocked cat clans.
meow meow hiss hiss
Cat clans are full of teenagers.
Roleplayers are adults acting like teenagers.
Wonder which group has more dignity in the end.
We never really leave high school. We only think we do. Reputation and pettiness and drama and egos are everywhere, and so so many people become more or less who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives in high school. Multiple workplaces, groups of friends, online communities, and even family have taught me this.
The moral of the story? No one should be surprised by the popularity-contest-type things that happen in the RP community (that goes for MG and WrA because they’re really the same). We could get into a lengthy and unnecessary discussion on human psychology, but suffice it to say that when you put a lot of people together for almost any purpose you get the same issues over and over again.
Interact with the SLP or don’t. Troll bait or not, I’d encourage anyone reading this thread and feeling the wheels of curiosity turning in their minds to pay attention to the stories of people who used to be in the project as well as the stories of the people who still are. Do your due diligence and find information where you can. Form an educated opinion that doesn’t jump immediately to hyperbole. Learning to do this will serve you well in this wacky community and beyond.
Case in point
Cat clanners are roleplayers too.
Let’s just say there’s bad actors out there.
Having dipped in and out of the project over time, it has its positives and negatives. On the one hand, it’s awesome that so many people work together across guilds and the server as a whole to put together something so big, complex and interactive. The loosely-related Conquest event that just happened seemed like it was a lot of fun, and was an impressive example of people working together to tell a story on a large scale.
On the other hand, working “together” is something of a misnomer. The fundamental core of the “law” part of the project is competitive, rather than cooperative. Running for offices in the House of Nobles or the newer City Council gets to be eeeeeesh. The guard guilds and criminal guilds naturally oppose each other. Getting new legislation passed is competitive. Commoners versus nobles has recently turned vehemently competitive.
That would make for awesome story, if people weren’t human beings who have a hard time competing without taking it too seriously, letting IC and OOC bleed into each other, and trying to undermine each other OOC to “win” IC. I mean, heck, it’s well documented that if you give a person even an entirely imaginary position of power it can change their behavior in negative ways. This behavior goes on from all sides.
As a result, people get grudgy. They try and get IC rivals banned from the project OOC rather than have to face IC competition. They anonymously smacktalk each other nonstop in “secret-sharing” communities on Tumblr to try and push the perception that the people they don’t want to work with are terrible, unredeemable scum. People have gone as far as to send spies into the Discords of rival groups to try and dig up material to use as OOC blackmail or to get people tossed. Half of the people who belong to the SLP Discord are mostly there to be poised and ready to screenshot “receipts” that support their OOC claims that everyone that they don’t like should be booted and ostracized. Even me, here, now, I’m posting on an offserver alt so that people don’t try to “cancel” me and everyone that is even peripherally friendly with me because I expressed an opinion on more or less anything.
I firmly believe that it’s the IC competitive aspects that has turned the whole atmosphere project sour, but it seems like that’s the part of it that gets the most development these days. Which is sad, because it really would make for some awesome roleplay if people could oppose each other in-character and still genuinely like each other OOC, but unfortunately the bad apples who don’t have the emotional maturity to not blur the lines spoil vast swaths of the barrel.
OP.
Here’s your answer.
You know, for as detached as I’ve tried to remain in my few replies, this sentiment along with the stories posted here added to everything else I’ve ever been able to glean, has been illuminating. It most certainly gives the feeling that it is generally a good idea to opt out.
Which is funny for me as someone who doesn’t do alts at all. If all this fear of consequences is justified, perhaps I’ve just signed my own death warrant. 
OP, I’ll level with you.
If you think this is the first incarnation of the Stormwind Law Project, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s a whole bunch of egoists finding new and exciting ways to have others roleplay the way they want them to. Faith-based RP is the exact same way.
The whole thing is a mistake, and people are morons. That simple.
Not at all.
You write well and seem to be quite level headed.
My bet is you’ll be in high demand if you aren’t already.
The part of this server that posts here, on tumblr or other blogs, and takes part in projects like the OP mentioned is the minority. But if that minority assumes the other members of the server are low quality or not worth their time or effort then you get what the bad actors want: the perception of a tiny, worthy community where missteps will cost you.