So for those of you who can remember, last year around this time of year this happened. It’s happening again. There’s minor speculation on reddit they snuck in the data-throttling again without our knowing. TRP3’s Devs are confirming that apparently Blizzard knows it’s, “problem again,” but that we’re going to have to wait for them to fix it.
This has disastrous ramifications for the RP Community. I’ll just give you the bulletpoints:
- It makes finding roleplay casually impossible unless you’re willing to take out time to network across other platforms like Discord. Sure we did it this way and have been doing it this way, but it creates a hurdle for role-playing we haven’t needed in a decade.
- It makes RP Hubs impractical and impossible. This will make finding casual pick-up RP a chore and not worth the time it takes to load profiles when for decades if you wanted RP you knew where to go.
- It creates barriers between people’s characters. You no longer have an easy way to understand someone’s character from a simple few clicks to inform your interactions and writing with them. RP at it’s best is collaborative.
- The very nature of the change means giving guilds and cliques more importance because otherwise you will never find any consistent RP. Even then, if you don’t have the time to commit to how serious the commitment many RP guilds require can be, many people could potentially be shut out entirely.
To those who say it’s necessary, I call bologna. The multi-billion dollar corporation can fix their servers if they wanted to. This is the path of least resistance, and they are potentially relying on you to be a reliable addict that most gamers are to keep paying money to them no matter what they actually do, negatively, to the community.
This is a critical wound to the RP community that if it isn’t fixed will have dire ramifications. It’s going to create barriers to a hobby that hasn’t had them for over a decade. It’s time to make noise.