I’ve pondered this as well. I think it’s a lot of factors, but part of it is lack of good RP hubs outside of Orgrimmar. It seems like the Valley of Honor is the only place to reliably find Horde RP and frankly after BFA, a lot of Horde characters wouldn’t want to set foot there again.
One thing I’ve also noticed is a significant number of Horde RPers coming to RP hubs in Alliance territory just because they don’t have as much story baggage. Maybe that’s where it all went XD
Honestly this point resonates with me than anything else.
I’ve been Rping and playing in WoW litterally since the game launched when I was in my teens. I’m 35 now. Not only am I past the point where I’m itching for RP every time I log in, I simply don’t have the time to do so anymore. If I want to RP, I set a time, I hit someone up, I hash out a story premise and we meet up and probably end in time so both of us aren’t too exhausted to work in the morning.
Sitting around in a city waiting to be approached or meeting people organically, as awesome as it used to be, isn’t all that feasible for me anymore. I log in, mostly to get my PvP dailies out of the way, hit up my few RP buddies still around and then I’m out.
I hope not. I see tons of people with profiles. But not a lot of people actively mixing it up in open RP.
I keep thinking back to BC and Wrath - SMC was a huge hub. People were /saying
I don’t know what happened or how to fix. I suspec it has something to do with realm-crossing and the reliance on queing. We don’t have to be nearly as social as we were before.
I want to get into horde rp, but I don’t really do any community or guild stuff, only the casual walk up stuff MG has in SW. I play many characters (for reference in the last month and a half - 2 months got like 4 of them 1 - 70 and like 5 of them 60 - 70) Plus I kind of play just when the mood strikes. So for me, the casual walk up is the best option.
I think a big thing that would help it.
Basically, community events akin to the Alliance does. In lore holiday sort events are things that for the RP community draw interest from both factions and, thanks to advances in x-faction raids, can be attended by both sides to stoke further interest.
Having events like the Kosh’arg, various troll/tauren,Sin’dorei/Shaldorei holidas would probably help to improve things if provided in a setting where both factions can attend (albiet perhaps as observers).
The only major issue is that these things do require significant organizing to ensure people are on a similar page.
I am SO happy to come back to this topic and see a cornucopia of replies to it. I value reading everyone’s input on this. Many of the replies I’ve read are ones I’ve heard from others who have either quit horde rp, wow rp in general, or the issues they have with it,
I’m not trying to come off as one of those people who complains about horde rp “dying”, rather I want to hear what other people have to say on the issue and I’m really happy to read the different ones.
I would agree that Horde RP is its own worst enemy and the times of the year tend to cause RP to fluctuate as well. Public rp events ( at least on WRA-H ) bring folks out, but like with MG-H public events, people tend to scatter afterward.
There’s always been an “issue” with rp staying exclusively to whatever guild a person is in without much branching off to rp with randoms. Some people despise the idea of it, claiming randoms are the worst. I can understand the perspective, but there are a lot of cool folks out there amongst the chaos.
Please continue the discussion. I look forward to reading the replies. c:
They do, but it is also less to be the consistant reason people come back and more to drizzle a little fuel onto a spark of interest to let those who attend make RP characters to explore what they see more.
The Time Lost Caravan idea is something which might help a little with public RP. They just started forming and I don’t know how long before they’re ready for the first event, but i plan to help where i can.
Community rp like Mulgore mondays and Story Circle Sundays as well as Dance of the Earthmother, as well as the Summer and Winter Solstices provide a lot of cultural events Hordeside
I think a lot of it is that (like what others have said) is that MG-A is massive and consumed WRA-A like a beautiful rogue planet sucking up moons into its orbit.
MG-H and WRA-H are both considerably smaller than Alliance side, and I think it’s incredibly safe to blame story writing for it. Like, I was die-hard Horde 4 Life lok’tar all over my ogar and then they made all of us do a genocide with our own two hands.
Felt a bit icky, and made a lot of folks (I imagine) no longer want to touch the Horde, 'cause they’re The Baddies in plain daylight.
Previous iterations of Horde criminal crimes could easily be offloaded onto a cruddy warchief or “the demons made us do it” and were clearly the bad guys in the latter case. But BFA it was just… yeah. We killed like 90% of the Night Elven population because hot lady said so. It wasn’t a tactical surgical strike by a crazy orc warchief like theramore that characters could ICly go “that was horrific and I’m glad garrosh is dead now”.
It was basically everyone that was part of the Horde military had to now, in some fashion, grapple with the fact that even if they didn’t contribute at all to any of the war march through Night Elf lands, they certainly knew people who did.
This got rambly. TLDR: blizz made everyone horde-side actual bad guys for real this time and it made a lot of folks (presumably) not comfortable sticking with the faction that keeps getting villain-batted every other expac.
honestly yeah. I network with most of my connections at this point. Events are easier on the spoons.
Besides, I don’t see why we have to pick between MG-A and WrA-H and WrA-A. With trading possible across all characters, and upcoming warbands, I’ve been able to switch depending on what events are going on and what I feel like. If I want walkup in a massive crowd, I go to MG. If I want lasting, consequential RP, I go to WrA.
This is a better worded version of what I was trying to say. I don’t have any Horde-aligned characters anymore and so it feels weird going to places like Orgrimmar ICly, and there doesn’t seem to be Horde walkup anywhere else.
You could write an essay on why it seems like not a lot is happening, and Horde walk-up might feel stale, and why there seems to be… less on WrA Horde.
Imagine you go to an RP server, you’re fresh off the boat from the mandatory BFA campaign, you hit Valdrakken aaaaand… in an entire year you’ve maybe seen three instances of RP.
I’ve been around a long, long time across multiple RP servers and characters and I’ll tell you the things that I’ve seen that have contributed. Let’s go in reverse order.
The first is that most people want to be Ariel. They ‘want to be where the people are’. If they didn’t we’d see a lot more people on smaller pop realms like Cenarion Circle. When the last few bad expacs + the scandals happened, people dropped off the game in general and moved. This had the affect of people seeing empty streets on Horde and therefore moving to the populated ones on Alliance to not feel alone.
The second is the elitist attitude and folly of thinking that you’ll find anything all that different on one realm or another. No realm or server has anything that the other doesn’t. Complex, story driven RP within guilds? Some level of walk-up RP? People who are worth meeting? Drama? Yep. All realms have it. The difference is that some just have -more- of it because they have more people. More people = more RP = more everything that people bring.
The exact same people who play MG-A play WrA-H. Or used to, anyhow.
And finally, the biggest factor, I think, has been cross faction guilds. I know we’d think this is a boon, but hear me out a sec.
Before, people usually rolled on MG for Alliance and WRA for Horde. They were disconnected from each other, so it didn’t matter. You had to make a whole new everything anyhow, starting over, so most people kept them separate. Many people had ‘Horde-side guilds’ over on WrA. That isn’t needed anymore. Now you can be in the same guild as a Horde character and keep all your social connections as what you made on Alliance.
This doesn’t work in favor for Horde because of what other people have said. Horde has gotten the shaft and most people (for various reasons) don’t want to RP here anymore.
Plus the prettier cities have always held more favor. Who wants to RP in the dirt pit when you could RP in a castle?
It does tickle me a bit knowing that this may prove prophetic if a revamped Silvermoon ends up just sucking up all the RP from Orgrimmar.
Honestly, I’d love to see a prettier city on Horde start to breathe life back into it, so I welcome this possibility. I really like the races on Horde a lot more than Alliance, personally.
Valdrakken is gorgeous and huge- nobody uses it. If a ravamped Silvermoon gets any roleplaying presence at all, I’ll eat my scarf.
While we’re at it, we should also figure out a way to offer phases for Dazar’alor and Suramar that remove the hostile mob npcs that are lore wise no longer there so you can scoot around both and use both.
Also, just open the Throne Room at Daza’alor while we’re at it. You walk into it like it’s nothing in raid, no reason for it to be off limits.
Not gonna lie, I’ve actually RP’d dramatically more in Valdrakken on this character this expansion than in Orgrimmar because the buildings make absolutely fantastic stand ins.
And there’s a TON of buildings. And the elevation. And the views are gorgeous, and you could go anywhere in the isles immediately.
Oh but but but what if my character Regular McJackoff doesn’t have a dragon mount-
Shh. No. A green dragon is bored and more than happy to ferry you and your friend around. Enjoy. (Or a blue dragon if you have no colors unlocked)