Replying in general, here.
Guilds are tough everywhere these days. Well, they have been for about 4-5 years now - about the time a lot of RPers finished college and got jobs and families. It sucks to work on a theme, recruit, set up your Discord, plan out your guild events and then have people just simply not show up. That’s been happening on the regular since…at least the beginning of BFA.
There tend to be a few standard guild types: race/class, adventure, military/nautical, criminal or running a restaurant/tavern. There are a few break out ones like Tirisfal Theater with a more unusual theme, but not many. Even if you find a theme you like, there’s always a chance you’re going to run into a clique where the guild invites you but then never interacts. I’ve had that on WrA before - and on both MG and Classic as recently as last year. I tend to refuse to go to a guild that requires an application. If someone can’t tell by my TRP that I can write, and they need the theater of having me actually check boxes to state I’m agreeing to the same guild rules as just about everyone else’s so I can join a guild that only logs on for events, then I’m just as happy to make myself a vanity guild and RP with friends in other guilds.
Discord servers are overrated. I belong to WCP and one for MG RP. WCP chats too much for me to bother doing anything but glancing at events. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled it’s active. But I don’t have time to sit in that Discord and all the others I’m in and read up on everything. It does make one feel like an outsider to the group who is keeping a running commentary. I don’t bother with event servers - I feel like those should be for staff only unless they have an announcement channel. The forums used to have a similar feel. Before it slowed down and people moved to posting on the MG forums, it was hard to keep up.
I’m not sure who’s left on WrA who’s played here forever. I couldn’t tell you who the oldest guild is anymore (I’m not sure I ever could tbh). Many, if not most, of the established Alliance guilds shifted to MG. Others quietly hung up their skates and went home. I ignore the “10+ years of RP experience” type comments in someone’s TRP. It means literally nothing to me. I’m more interested in if the character sounds amusing.
As far as characters outside of the stereotype, people openly do that on WrA. There are also people who RP their DK as not a DK, or the paladin as not a paladin, because they separate their gameplay from their RP. There are always exceptions to the rules and I don’t think there are guilds here who are going to be upset because a vulpera wants to be a dentist, if you know what I mean.
And as far as lore, we didn’t even follow lore when we were following lore because lore changed or because someone had a neat concept they wanted to try. Or because someone got it in their head that dwarves didn’t hang out with humans, for example. We’ve had private kingdoms pop up on WrA. We had one in Hearthglen. We had one in the Gilnean looking town in…Swamp of Sorrows? We had one in Tyr’s Hand. We’ve had people RP completely different genres on WrA so they’re Warhammer or some kind of other concept. We don’t have those now because so many people left.
As far as comparisons between WrA and MG, it’s been the same crowd for at least 2 expacs now, with people defecting from one to the other. There are also people who’ve played both for years. I made a Kirsy named placeholder character on MG back in LK and if I logged onto it, people recognized me from WrA. It’s just moreso right now that WrA Alliance defected in droves once the “WrA is for Horde” comments started flying. On a typical WrA evening in SW, there are 8-12 RPers. That’s it. It’s been like that for about a solid year. I thought we might be able to bring back some of the RP from MG, but I 100% do not see that happening.
I will say that MG had 2 things that WrA didn’t: 1. They allowed anything without much commentary. There was a human woman RPer who was Queen of Ironforge for awhile and no one gave her flak for it. That wouldn’t have flown on WrA. 2. They had server lore that created a pecking order for things such as the clergy. That also didn’t fly on WrA. But now that so many people have defected to MG Alliance, I don’t see them talk about their server lore so much. It would just be too much to try to enforce.
This would also be a good place to touch on the fact that there’s a private WoW server out there that a lot of people are playing on that has also pulled a lot of RPers off this server. It’s been going for a few years now. It’s nothing I’m interested in because I feel like being able to create your own zones is a bit too lore bendy for me.
As far as Horde RP, we have far less guilds than we had at the beginning of BFA, but I don’t think we’ve recently taken any significant losses. SL killed off a lot of interest in WoW and some people are bored with the current expac. There are still Horde guilds that are recruiting and active, but it’s a smaller but steady crowd mostly due to aging of the game and the players.
