Role Play...mode?

Community General Discussion
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https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/role-playing-mode/1192674

It’s my understanding that linking the post will notify the post author. I have a few quick thoughts on this Council Member’s suggestion for Role Players in WoW. The link is there for everyone to look at if they’re interested in the topic as well.

  1. RP grows by being SEEN. If RPers are cut off in their own mode, players who dont know what RP is, for whatever reason, will never see what they’re missing out on. I and almost everyone I know who RPs in WoW stumbled on it by accident in whatever game they were playing, mostly WoW.

  2. Sharding is KILLING RP. It’s not even supposed to be active on RP realms per requests and blue posts that followed, but they keep forgetting to turn it off every time they patch the game. RP realms depend on being able to pack hundreds of players into a non-Org/Sw capital city or even open world zone. Nothing, it feels like since I first watched it DESTROY planned RP events centered around the invasion in the WoD prepatch, has made RPers give up and leave WoW like Sharding cutting them off from one another. Faction balance would be NICE, but as an RPer, being able to see the people around me is a way more important factor, even during new content releases when it slows down the game.

  3. RP realms used to have a strict RP realm Tos but it has never been available in game and I cant even find it on bnet anymore, where it was nothing beyond “no non rp names on rp realms” anymore. What I feel needs to happen is the full RP Realm ToS needs to return to the game and pop up on a slow scroll mode whenever a person logs into an RP realm for the first time since its implementation and every time they create a new toon thereafter with an agree or disagree at the bottom. A transfer should be initiated to a non RP realm if the player disagrees. This would also give players ignorant about RP as an available game mode an idea of what’s up and whether they want to check it out!

  4. I do think an “RP LFG” mode would be great. While I personally consider LFG a blight on the game for promoting anon bad behavior, it exists, and if RPers could select a mode that would only match them with players from RP realms for dungeons, bgs, and lfr that would be awesome.

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One problem I noticed with RP was the trouble finding people who enjoy similar styles of roleplay or storylines.

I’m not sure a LFG tool would help as there is such a variety of RP subject matters and styles and different people enjoy different things. It might be helpful though. I’m not sure.

Over the years I have contemplated using my software engineering skills to create resources to help people find people through algorithmic matching. I decided against it in 2019 and have been focusing on making similar concepts for university students instead.

I just don’t want to deal with maintaining an addon that piggybacks onto TRP, nor do I want to waste my own money on hosting for a web app, nor the drama that comes with making apps for the RP crowd.

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RP got a bad rep by being associated with Goldshire exotic chats and such. Not saying that ERP doesn’t have it’s place, it does. Especially if combined with good old RP.

I think RP should have opt in areas, where you can toggle it off if you aren’t into it. Or tune in if you are. Trouble is, there are always trolls who want to come in with God Mode and ruin it for everyone. That’s the beauty of instanced rp areas for people to enjoy their group rp without being trolled.

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This is pretty much true. The few times I tried to join an RP server the various people I would encounter had very, very specific guidelines for what they considered proper RP. Woe to anyone who did not fall within those guidelines.

:cookie:

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In the past I have solved that issue by joining an RP guild. Once you find like minded individuals.

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Roleplay is a situation where one must curate their own experience. It’s easy to ignore godmoding trolls.

Sadly there are much worse behaviors that are less overt that people don’t immediately yeet into the sun, and are allowed to fester and poison scenes. I’m talking about antisemitic types of gross.

I would love player housing or guild halls/community group halls as space to RP should a group prefer to not be visible and just want to be left alone.

Different people have different levels of seriousness.

They also have different approaches.

Despite being an award winning writer, I’ve had RPers poopoo on me for not filling some arbitrary minimum requirement for the number of buffers I’m required to fill to play with them.

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It’s not that sharding is killing RP realms (let’s just face it, it’s one realm at this point Moon Guard and we shard with other RP realms btw) it’s that the RP community was always smaller than the rest of the game. But just like the rest of the game that community also took a hit with Shadowlands being…well Shadowlands.

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100% agree.

RP realms don’t really have RP on them anymore. They’ve just become low pop places. GM’s don’t help us in any fashion when people PURPOUSLY ruin events. We can’t even use appropriate chat channels in zones and have to use our community chats while running these events.

Honestly, if PVPers think they have it bad at times for not being supported, try being an RPer in this game anymore.

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The problem with RP is Blizzard does not support it. They don’t do GM events on RP servers like some MMOs have done. There is no in-game profile system to put your character info unless you download an addon and probably the most important

They don’t punish griefers. RP servers are notorious for people who do nothing but try to disrupt any RP or player run events or just outright harass RP’ers and they are never punished for it.

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The game is certainly a factor in the anemia of RP realms.

Blizzard’s gross behavior is also partially to blame.

However, RPers also carry some of the blame.

I personally noped right out of RP after a bunch of antisemites and narcissists encroached on the rp community I once enjoyed.

Instead I’m a PvE hero who RPs with a partner on Discord away from undesirable elements and disruptions. There might be people out there who enjoy our storylines but I don’t care to try and find them.

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Yeah this is a big problem too. Self-policing has to be a thing and most players aren’t willing to do it and has already been said many times Blizzard is incapable of punishing extremely toxic players in any meaningful way

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Back when we used channels instead of communities, the antisemitic trolls had been trolling a channel I was in and the people who had ownership were too afraid to do anything. Then they got control of it and abused power.

Blizzard did nothing to help. I had to learn Lua and write an addon that yeeted the antisemitic trolls from a channel upon entry. I had some acquaintances in Europe and Australia run it as well for 24/7 coverage.

The trolls were furious. But the people who had been turning a blind eye to them got mad at me for denying antisemitic trolls a space in an open forum.

Sadly the people mad at my troll yeeting had influence so I eventually just peaced out. I don’t want to play with people who make nice with antisemites, racists, or other phobes.

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Fully agreed on both of these.

And having a dedicated warmode-like mode for RP wouldn’t get rid of the griefers anyway, it’d just make it even easier to find people susceptible to trolling.

Idk about forced slow-scrolling or anything, but yeah, I’d be fine with bringing back RP Realm rules (if they’re actually gone - not sure if they are) and having a one-time popup the first time you make a character on an RP realm.

Though, that only has meaning if Blizzard enforces the rules if people report. Frankly, they probably haven’t for a very long time, which is probably why they took down the articles about it.

This is the thing I don’t really see a purpose in.

The percentage of people who want to RP their way through a dungeon is pretty low to begin with. The percentage of people who want to RP their way through a dungeon with totally random people is next to 0. It would just be a way to make your LFD queues take 3 hours.

It just seems like something that makes way more sense to do manually with a group that’s looking to do it.

(Having a macro tied to a 3 minute cooldown isn’t really RPing through a dungeon and no one cares if its on a long CD like that, people only get annoyed if you tie it to a rotational ability so it’s spamming every 15 seconds)

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As someone heavily invested in roleplay and someone who loves to create and RP a variety of characters, I completely disagree with the implementation of some kind of RP mode. The game’s already sharded enough with various modes, classic, BC classic, etc, etc. We keep separating the player base over and over, and we’ll run into even more problems. The thing the RP community actually needs is more attention to models, details, and customization. Everything else we can make work. You know what we could use? Differing idle poses.

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Part of the problem with this in particular is that the vitriol spreads through other mediums like Discord and Tumblr, where RPers go to coordinate and enrich their experiences or outright RP in the story setting but not in the game and Blizzard has literally no say in what goes on, there. There’s nothing much to be done about it besides avoid those mediums.

I think 1 click reporting, which didnt exist when things were frankly MUCH worse on many realms than they are on WrA or MG, now, would help cull a lot of bad behavior. RP realms could use a 1 click “harassment” or “hate” report- as could all realms, really. Harassment and bullying should NOT be so hard for ANYONE to report.

The ignore system needs to be much more robust, as well. Ignoring a toon should ignore the entire bnet account associated with the player and it would be great if their characters literally became invisible to the victim- without Sharding ideally.

Custom in-game channels would be solved-ish if rp realm ToS were reinstated and general chat was used for things like finding RP, but sometimes the power of “community” is insurmountable. In my experience since Wrath across several RP realms, abusive players are almost always highly charismatic and imaginative, and I’ve seen REALMS die when they were driven off because they WERE the focal point of plots spanning multiple guilds in both factions. They DO control the narrative and level of inclusivity in many instances, wielding some level of power over up to thousands of players back in the day on some realms. As the community has dwindled, their strangleholds have only grown in influence. Or they were.

I notice of late as SL has truly gutted the community (expacs that are impossible to RP are SO BAD for Rpers) that many if not all these players seem to have lost interest in fighting for control over the scraps and appear to have wandered off to other games. It’s nice and quiet for now, but also terribly quiet, and I think a healthier RP environment would only entice them to return.

Back in the day, there used to be “pilgrimages” where groups of hundreds of players would transfer to new realms or factions to get away from these bad actors for a while, but CRZ and letting players play both factions on one realm has destroyed that. I’d personally like to see these features disabled/reverted on RP realms and smaller realms properly merged not CRzed to be of a size with WRA, MG, and ED. (It would probably take every single other NA realm being combined for a total of 4 realms) I just think having 8 healthy player pools that were their own separate spaces would somehow help.

RP is both most removed and closest to a real life situation. We interact with real people behind story characters, and they have real opinions as their characters have opinions. There’s aspects the RP community will always have to deal with, themselves, but…

It would be REALLY GREAT, if there were just…2 GMs per RP realm whose job it was to BE IN the environment. Present and known to the players in a global general chat, invitable to guilds and channels where they could see what was going on and address it in real time. Other MMOs - some that are F2P- DO have this kind of support for RP and non-RP realms alike, and it’s kind of inane that WoW doesnt.

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A part of me feels like it would be neat to have some built in features that we see in profile addons.

However, I can see that being abused and can see why Blizzard might be apprehensive about doing so.

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The only RPing anyone needs is going on down at the inn’s basement in Goldshire on the Moon Guard server…

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https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/role-playing-mode/1192674/2

Thanks for weighing in and linking back, Halite!

Also wanted to say many of us on NA servers wish we could RP on EU RP realms…only we’d probably ruin them. EU realms are always described as much happier places, and I know from playing LOTRO with some EU players that they’re much more invested and proactive in keeping their RP communities enjoyable for as many players as possible. I wish NA players shared that level of commitment to the playmode and one another.

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One thing I forgot to mention earlier.

RP addons use a Lua function called SendAddonMessage(Whisper) (or is it SendAddonMessage()Whisper?).

This feature silently fails when interacting with a random walkup on another server.

Bor worked around it for parties, instance groups, raids, and when people are on btag. His workarounds were eventually integrated into the library libmsp that RP addons use.

Making us share space with other servers would be less catastrophic if our profile addons actually worked across server.

If Blizzard could make SendAddonMessage(Whisper) not silently fail across servers, even if it’s just RP servers, that would be groovy.

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The biggest challenge RP faces right now outside of the low population situation is the griefing. WRA Horde has struggled with griefing in the main RP hub of Orgrimmar for a few years now and its only gotten worse. Corpse literring, chat spamming, toy spamming, duels right in the middle of people RPing, hostility when the griefers are asked to stop, etc. I’m not a regular on MG Alliance so I can’t give any specifics on their situation, but I’m aware of griefing that takes place there too.

I’m not saying we should get special privileges or protection, but if Blizzard refuses to action people who are intentionally trying to disrupt RP there isn’t going to be a community for much longer. Actions need to have consequences, and if people see they can harass others and get away with it then it’s never going to stop.

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