Good afternoon 
Shout out to Valestia for linking my post in General Discussion and prompting another forum discussion. It also encouraged others to contact me in-game for further perspectives. It granted me a grander view of other people’s thoughts and opinions, which I’ll try my best to articulate below.
One of the most common concerns players were voicing was the griefing/harassment/bullying when engaging in Role Playing. One poster nailed it on head when he explained that role players (RPers) want to feel safe while role playing. Many posters were in favor of implementing a more stringent “Report Hate/Harassment” connected to Role Playing realms so that the griefers can be immediately expunged from the realm. In my initial post about creating a Role Playing Mode, I believe griefers just simply would not turn on the Role Playing Mode, so that RPers could engage in open-world role playing freely. Unfortunately, there is the sad reality that some players are going to be jerks and would turn on the modality just to harass others. If a Role Playing Mode were to be implemented, Blizzard would need to enhance security to prevent such bad actors from spoiling the fun. Perhaps similar to how there is a vote kick in LFG Raids, players in said mode would be able to “Vote Kick” a player from the Role Playing Mode modality, with a strict lockout punishment (perhaps hours/days).
One of common dissenting opinions I noticed about Role Playing Mode seemed to be tied to the method in which players engage in role playing. I mentioned it in the initial post, but currently RPers are forced to engage in Communities and other websites/applications to arrange scheduled role playing events. It seemed some of these players enjoy controlled role playing storylines where everyone engaged in the event is aware of what they are role playing into. It seems these players fear that an open Role Playing Mode would allow any random role player to walk into an active storyline and possibly derail it, even if unintentionally. It also seems they feared competing RP groups trying to install their own storylines into an active RP event. I will admit I was a bit baffled by this concern as it also seemed that the consensus was they want role players to be more seen. I don’t believe Blizzard would be able to really provide a solution to this concern, and it would rely heavily on the player-base self-policing if they do not want outsiders engaging into their own storyline. My only thoughts would be if these tight-knit role playing communities wanted to carry on an active storyline without disturbance, then they would be able to do so outside a highly populated area in the vast World of Warcraft.
In response to Halite, I will admit all of my role playing experience has been on American/Latin American RP PVP Realms. It also seems to be the consensus that the European Role Playing realms put the other countries’ servers to shame hah. I appreciate your criticisms and feedback. I wanted to pick your brain about your commentary on role player’s separation of in-character and out-of-character content. You mentioned newer zones typically require out-of-character gameplay, which causes players to swap between the two modes. I concur. That was one of the reasons I thought Role Playing Mode may be a solution, so that everyone with that modality active can stay in-character while that is active. I believe players swap out of character because the new content is sharded heavily, and players are not surrounded by other role players, so to try to role play through new content would be futile.
I believe your suggestion of adding an RP mode toggle and sharding into role playing realms is basically the same idea I’m proposing with Role Playing Mode. I agree with all your suggestions.
Hopefully we can keep this discussion going with greater ideas to assist the role playing community. Thanks to everyone thus far to has spent their time sharing their insight and thoughts with me