Great that this has been brought up, even if I do have some criticisms and alternative opinions on the matter :>
I don’t wholly agree with the idea of an RP mode largely because I think it doesn’t necessarily fix the problems roleplayers face, and can also be a half-baked solution to a wider problem. Plus, if this is another layer of sharding, you’re going to split the community - and that is a greater threat than anything listed in here.That isn’t to say they are bad ideas in of themselves, but these things are important to consider carefully.
Cross-server interaction in itself has been pretty good for roleplayers, it has meant that they can participate in the actual game without having to leave for another server, as RP realms are often not as populated on the top end. The real problem that came along with cross.realm-zones was sharding. When it was first implemented, roleplay almost died overnight because you couldn’t log in and go around to interact with people as you used to. There are rules set in place now that prevent sharding to take place on RP realms, but as far sa I know, it only applies to cities. Most old zones also avoid being sharded because of low traffic, which is why they are also usable by roleplayers.
This is only true to an extent. Although I can’t speak for every RP server, on Argent Dawn EU you can pretty confidently find roleplay without having to do much organisation, assuming you know where to look. Major cities like Stormwind or Legion Dalaran being good examples, but you can also head out to Uldum or Duskwood to find people. The main limitation for finding roleplay is numbers; there’s just not enough people to cover the entire world, and so they tend to gather in hubs and stretch outwards from there through guilds and communities. Granted, AD-EU is a pretty big RP server, and this is likely not the case for smaller ones.
Even if you can’t wander around and find people to RP with, there’s usually other solutions that can help you find people to RP with without having to resort to joining a guild or community. In-game channels have (at least traditionally) been a good way to advertise and announce roleplay to the world. There are also out-of-game resources for many servers that allows you to find what you’re looking for, whether it be a discord server, an independent website or the WoW RP forums. If you know where to look, you will likely find it!
This has unfortunately been the case forever, and still is, and there’s even a lot of cyber-bullying going around between roleplayers as well. It’s a problem in general and definitely not unique to roleplayers, but I also don’t think sheltering us in a safe space is the solution, it should be cracking down on bad behaviour and eliminating the stigma of roleplay to normalise it.
Again, I can’t speak for every realm, but this is also only true to an extent on AD-EU. You rarely see roleplay happen in current-expansion zones because of the high traffic of non-roleplayers, but also because these zones are heavily sharded because of the traffic. I do agree that this can be somewhat problematic and off-putting for many roleplayers, but it depends on your style of roleplay a lot. In other words; there are other limitations than the existence of non-RP players that hinder a lot of roleplay in more modern zones, and to reiterate my point from earlier, old zones see so little traffic that non-RPers are rarely seen or felt there.
I don’t actually know many roleplayers who actively roleplay while engaging with general gameplay (i.e. without breaking character at all), whether that would be by macroing a yell to an ability or whether they stop to talk to each other during questing, and I know a lot of roleplayers personally, and hundreds by association. Most roleplayers that I know have a pretty strict separation of in-character (IC) and out-of-character content (OOC), and it is simply much more difficult to arrange roleplaying (IC) content in newer zones because it typically requires you to play the game using traditionally OOC gameplay. You’ll also find roleplayers who abhor the usage of in-game abilities at all, and exclusively fight with one another through emotes, roll battles or otherwise. Players who don’t break character at all are fairly niche, even in the roleplaying community, at least to the best of my experience. That isn’t to say this style of roleplay is bad or unwanted, I’m all for enabling these players to enjoy the game as they would like to play it.
Just as an aside; “RP LFG dungeons” is probably going to be very niche and will have long queue times, and would need to come with a lot of caveats attached to it to enforce that the mode isn’t being abused or otherwise used for targeted harrassment. Besides, there’s nothing really stopping you from doing these dungeons in a fully-decked RP mode already; assuming you have four friends who are willing to tag along, and you enter the instance through the portal instead of through the LFG tool. (Teleporting to dungeons randomly while out in the world alongside four random people is pretty immersion-breaking to most roleplayers anyway!)
I think the real solution for most roleplayers’ woes should come from implementing new rules to RP servers specifically, just a handful of half-baked ideas here:
- Instead of adding an RP mode toggle, add a toggle to opt in/out of sharding for roleplay realms. If you opt in to sharding, you can shard to other servers, but if you opt out, you will stay on your server. You can only shard to an RP server if you are invited by someone already on it. There might be some ways to abuse this, but overall the intention is to preserve the sanctity of the community of the RP server, because community is the key to roleplay’s survival.
- Return to stricter enforcement of the terms of service for RP servers. In my young teenage I thought RP was silly, and I was goofing around on an RP server by making a tauren called McBeef. I rightfully got reported for my trolling and my character was either deleted or was forced to change its name, I can’t recall the exact outcome. Either way, the point of my anecdote is that roleplay servers used to be fairly strict with what behaviour was and wasn’t tolerated on them, and it seems prudent to reinvest in some of that to curb trolling, cyber-bullying and worse (Community Management and Toxicity - #3 by Halite-bonechewer).
- Create tools to help players find and get into the roleplay they want to find. This isn’t strictly speaking about tools made by the devs either; most existing tools to find roleplay have been created by the community. Whether it is a LFRP channel in-game, a discord or otherwise, every little bit helps.
- More positive representation of RP in general. RP is considered a joke by so many people, often because its representation in wider media has been incredibly minimal, or viewed through the lens of someone cracking a joke at it. Blizzard and content creators alike might want to highlight RP more, and celebrate it as a part of WoW and its fandom, because it will not only appease existing roleplayers, but also bring new players into the fold, and reduce the stigma against roleplayers. The notion that RP is “playing the game wrong” is pretty rampant in the WoW community, and is certainly a myth I think we ought to dispel. Just because an activity within a game appeals to a smaller niche, doesn’t mean it’s invalid and doesn’t deserve attention.
I’m sure there are lots of things I haven’t thought about, and I might not be entirely right in some of my assessments (I’m biased coming from a big RP server as well!), so I definitely encourage more opinions and discussion on this. I also noticed a thread on the GD attached to this topic, so I thought I’d also link that here, as it has relevant points: Role Play...mode?.