The Library of Adventurers
As heroes fall, we struggle to remember them.
What the heck is this about?
I would like to propose the formation of an in-game faction-neutral group that meets up once every 1-2 months and holds meetings where they discuss scholarly matters like what they’ve discovered about player-originating content. Basically, revealing things about characters or groups that we players have created ourselves that might not have had a chance to be discussed openly before.
On top of offering more RP for people who have Historian and Scholar characters, this would also allow for people to share background lore and information that they’ve developed on their own that other players may find relevant to their own stories or situations, and will allow the two content creators to coordinate their efforts in a more constructive manner. This, in turn, will help bolster not just the quality of the role-play for all parties involved, but the general health of the server as well.
These meetings would not be Story Circle-themed sessions; rather, they would be more in the line of ancient colleges and libraries. In essence, it would just be different characters meeting up, discussing what they have discovered, explaining why this might be important/relevant, presenting the evidence, and adding this knowledge to the collection in some form - after their peers have formed a consensus that it should be added.
Okay, so where will we post this "collection"?
Now, I’d also like to make an OOC proposal that goes hand-in-hand with the formation of this IC “Library”.
This idea has seen many iterations, but it has rarely been given a lot of attention. Every Role-Player on WoW uses various methods to discuss their characters - in-game conversation events like Story Circles, Discord server posts, Fanwiki pages, and forum threads. With all of these options available, and due to the incomplete nature of each option, it is quite literally impossible to search for information regarding people’s characters, guilds, and stories unless you know exactly what you are looking for, and exactly where that content was posted. There is also no current method in use for people to share and discuss stories of characters that may be retired or killed off, nor is there an easy way to share other characters that might have been killed off before the current lore event started (parents killed in battle, teachers lost during one of the invasions, etc).
As an example - Fanwikis. The WyrmrestAccord Fanwiki has a strong userbase, and is frequently updated to this very day. However, navigating the fanwiki is next to impossible if you were not the original creator of the page entries. Further, while the wiki is easy to use for a creator, as a resource of information other than general character pages with short biographies, it doesn’t offer the full array of content hosting that many writers who create content for characters and guilds need to share their material. In other words, if you want to read a short story and you can’t remember the name or the author, you’re basically screwed. Authors are also unable to add “chapters” to stories, and instead have to add them onto the original page or are forced to create new pages for each chapter. Idhron and the current moderation team is doing a great job (and have been for a decade now!), but the platform itself is the problem.
However, we can actually assemble a resource tool that would allow people to access this content in a more manageable way. For content that is inaccessible, such as Discord and other private messaging posts, we can host this content ourselves if the creators so wish it. What I’m talking about is making a site where navigating through characters, guilds, stories, journals, and so on, becomes a much easier task than the options currently available to us. At the moment, I’m suggesting that a forum is created. We can create forum categories and subcategories that allow for the fast and simple navigation of content.
For example, we could assemble the forum like this:
And so on from there. We would be able to organize stories based on the era in which they were relevant, and add special tag options that allow people to link stories with other character pages, so that searching for a character would yield any relevant stories to that character.
If you think either of these ideas are worth the time and energy it would take to assemble them, I’d love to hear about it. If you think that either of these are total wastes of time and bandwidth, I’d also love to hear about why. I have discussed this topic with many people privately, but I haven’t made an attempt to draw public attention to it before.
For the moment, I only want to confirm a general interest check in the ideas that I’ve presented. Such a project would take time to assemble, and there would need to be a small team of dedicated individuals managing both the IC and OOC “libraries”. If there is a general census that shows significant interest, we can start making plans after that point. I don’t want anyone to begin getting ahead of themselves.
Thanks for reading this gigantic wall of text!
