I mean, for a reasonable, normal person it doesn’t, as long as you’re not like, between someone and the person they’re talking to. There’s that one dude floating around in the thread who has a chip on his shoulder about it but honestly…I think it’s just him.
So many. SO MANY. The default go-to is if you walk around Stormwind or Orgrimmar on a populated RP server people will just be hanging out, standing around, that you can walk up to and engage maybe like 90% of the time. Because you literally just walk up to people, they call this “Walk up RP”. Then sometimes there will be open public events at scheduled times that get announced on the server forum or shared server discords. Like, on Moon Guard the Tournament of Ages just got done last week, an annual week-long festival that uses the Argent tournament grounds in Icecrown with vendors, competitions, events, a ball, and RL charitable donations being raised. More commonly you’ll see like a regular bar night, a regular storytelling night, a regular street market, etc.
Hopefully people set up that kind of stuff on the Classic servers also.
There’s often an awkward moment of “oh man I’m standing on top of someone” when you log in in the city, it’s all good. Happens to everyone! But yeah, most of the time people just run away and it’s never spoken of again, unless the people involved feel silly and roll with it. And really just because it’s a RP server doesn’t mean everything is dead serious all the time, you’ll still occasionally see someone swoop down out of the sky, jump around on top of their friend, hit them with a couple of toys, emote biting them and then take off again. The key differentiator there being “their friend” though, it’s not usually received well by a rando you don’t know. You get a feel for when someone is probably doing something In-Character and when they’re just being a dork fairly fast, although even with long term experience questions like, ((Uh…is this IC?)) are common, or even occasional bracketed OOC commentary on what’s going on, like ((Wow I’m full of fail today)) after a string of typos. It’s courteous to not have too much OOC communication in /say though because it can quickly turn to spam…
Especially when people start bickering OOC at each other over IC stuff, like ((You couldn’t have dodged my attack!)) ((Yes I can all actions should be attempts!)) ((But it doesn’t make sense with my character’s mastery of the shadows!)) etc. etc. That part of the hobby is, uh…always fun.
And happens a lot.