If you’re going to compare to Vanilla, remember that there were a lot of non-roleplayers who rolled on Roleplaying servers because, as they would say “they had friends who played on this server.”
Many roleplayers existed then, and many roleplayers fled from Argent Dawn and other realms to Moon Guard and Wyrmrest Accord.
The difference was often that roleplay then was often small, inside a guild or maybe with a ‘guild alliance’ of a handful of guilds. There was rarely large serverwide roleplay.
Moon Guard wasn’t a day one server, it was launched a week before TBC. And it became that way as the larger RP realms, such as Argent Dawn moved en masse via realm transfers.
MG’s reputation was made in Wrath, when Blizzard announced that they were sending a GM in to Goldshire to patrol the area to keep the place from having open ERP that everyone could see. (Engadget and the wayback machine confirm this happened).
I agree. I was one of those people. But we all respected the RP and didn’t attempt to degrade it. I wasn’t an RPer but I enjoyed watching it all. Even ignoring the RP, the playerbase was generally just nicer.
Hmm, especially in major cities, I saw lots of RP activity especially in the Gardens in SW.
The Park was pretty popular back in the day, but it’s not so different as the Mage District or even the Cathedral District of post-Wrath changes. I never saw the Park’s Vanilla RP activity be flooded like I’ve seen the Mage District on a weekend in Retail on MG/WrA, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be hopping in Classic.
One thing that was enormously popular between Cata and Legion was the presence of guilds in Stormwind, gathered in front of the fountain, banners waving, for guild recruitment.
It’s died down a little bit, now that everyone is scattered across the world, but you’ll still see roleplayers roleplaying for the sake of roleplaying in such areas.
And of course, there’s big events, like the Tournament of Ages, which has players of both sides attending in large numbers.