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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
The only RPing anyone needs is going on down at the inn’s basement in Goldshire on the Moon Guard server…
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.
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.
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.
I think the best example was when Asmongold and other streamers flooded RP servers doing the project 60 things and even after numerous cases of griefing and harassment from their hanger-ons Blizzard just shrugged and told people to deal with it instead of handing out punishments to rulebreakers.
RP is such a difficult thing to discuss because so much is about personal immersion. For me it breaks down into about three categories for general purposes: location, tools, and security.
Security: This is the most important one because rpers want to rp in safe spaces. By safe I mean places free of outside harassment. RP events, no matter the size, are big parts of rp life, being unable to do them reduces rp enjoyment over enjoyment of the game for rpers. The community can only do so much to police their events. Blizzard has to figure out a way to remove disruptive people from rp events.
Location: Rp can happen anywhere but finding nice locations can be hard. I have noticed that in the newer xpacs there are very few rp “friendly” places or even places that look like people would live there. Cities, villages, towns, hobo camps, abandoned places, random sitting areas, gardens or anything that can be used as a backdrop. In older zones you have all these different settings but players tend to be in the new zones.
So I would like to see some intentional design with RP zones. These zones can vary is scale but ideally they would be places not hard to find but not too close to major hubs to lag them out. Places with a few npcs around to make them feel alive.
Tools: RP really does not needs much just some people willing to do it but a few tools can add to the overall feel of it. TRP3 is a really good addon but for people just trying out rp not too many people want to download an addon for that. Basic character pages would help, even if you are not on an rp server. Those pages can be used to place any information a players wants the community at large to know. Toys and reusable items that add fun elements to rp. The noodle carts, reusable feast, chairs, and etc are good starts but having something like tents, bar carts, workstations would be nice. Reducing or removing the cooldown on some toys would be nice as well. Transmog is also a tool for rp but the restrictions on items do not allow for as much customization as possible. I am not saying remove gear type or class restriction but remove things like level, rep, profession restrictions. Allow for grey/ white items to transmoggable as well. There many people that have low level characters that only are for rp, banking, or whatever else so removing those restrictions would free up more options for them.
i used to think rp was a joke because people made fun of it, then i decided to check out one of the rp realms like wymrest or moonguard and went into cities to see what people were doing
some of their storylines and immersion put the current game story to shame
Thanks for linking the article! It did notify me 
I look forward to reviewing all of your commentary and the responses here. I will try to incorporate everyone’s thoughts as best I can in a follow up response in the WoW Council thread.
I used to be deep into the RP community through MoP. Ever since I came back in Legion, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to come across RP in the open world… even going to the usual tavern locales and such, I either almost never see anyone, or I see people obviously RPing in party chat. 
I agree that separating RPers off in their own “game mode” is a horrible idea, though. Would make it even harder to come across RP than it already is.
Thanks for adding your thoughts to our responses to the Council forum thread, Mornah.
On the subject of events hosted by groups that dont want to be disrupted by non rpers or rpers who arent “filled in on the event” running into them, I believe you misunderstood our concern. (Although I can only see these posts and dont know what was mailed to you in-game. )
The concern as I read others posts, and as I’M concerned, is that an “rp mode” would give these players MORE control over an even more isolated RP community, and make those who opted into it vulnerable to their efforts to control everything.
RP needs to be completely public on RP servers to AVOID this happening. It also needs to be public so new players who dont know what RP is all about can see it at work. An RP mode would trap rpers with charismatic ill intentioned players and cut them off from growing their community. I would be highly suspicious of the motivations of a player who was in favor of or opposed to rp mode to avoid the notice of other players and, indeed, other Rpers.
The open world is HUGE, there’s no reason players hosting events cant do it somewhere out of the way of griefers or rpers who arent clued in…but griefing shouldnt be a problem in the first place, hence the need for one click harassment reporting.
We already have “a place” to do our thing, RP servers. We dont need an RP mode to fix problems with RP, we need more support from Blizzard for the playmode and its designated servers.
On vote to kick- please, NO. One bad apple with a ton of charisma can swarm victims with the votes of their supporters and abuse such a system to abuse other rpers into submission. (This already basically happens with social pressure so we know what it looks like) We already have report tools. We just need Blizz to act when we use them.
I don’t remember where I read it, but somebody posted an idea for an “RP mode” similar to war mode.
The general idea was to allow roleplayers to wander around mob infested zones, without any worry of mob aggro, or to have hostile zones become “friendly” ones.
I know being max level erases the threat of mobs wandering into, or even affecting your rp, but it takes me out of it when I have to stop typing to arcane explode on everything around the group.
A “blank map mode” for rp would be “cool” and RPers would eat it up, but I Don t think it’s worth the tradeoff of losing public exposure to attract new RPers. The RP community is dwindling, it doesnt need to become even more isolated.
I think this speaks a lot to the import of Blizzard utilizing blank space in the future, though, with “not so blank space”.
The revamp in Cata added some “easter egg rp areas” to unused expanses of the Map that are really cool- but it would be nice if they didnt feel like easter eggs, if they were less few and far between- literally. Every “location on the map” could really use at least one blank space- more for say cities, with empty buildings with functioning furniture and such where RPers could take the chance to get immersed with the area and each other without being in thr immediate way of other players, and the world could ironically feel more alive from the addition of “empty venues not empty spaces” as an alternative to just…gutting a shard of the map so rpers can hide in it.
The players who feel they would benefit from a blank map would probably benefit even more from properly realized player housing, anyway, without it consuming entire worlds on RP servers.