I remember when a big underlying theme of early Alliance zones in Cataclysm is the War against the Lich King basically collapsed the economy completely. If you weren’t a war industry, you were destitute. They even brought it back in WoD with the two rival farmer families literally going to a different reality to find work.
But otherwise it’s never touched on.
Wow. I guess I missed a lot. Sorry if my transmog ruffled any feathers. I genuinely don’t have the patience for RP these days for many of the reasons listed above.
Your transmog is absolutely fine! No feathers have been ruffled. Honestly there are only a very few situations where the murlock PJs actually bother me.
Love you, Backwards! <3
Aarakocra onesies when, Blizzard?
My gripes are never about the onesie.
My gripe is that if Blizz is going to say that transmog is restricted for lore or gamplay reasons (muh immersion) and then they add the yeti pajamas?
Loosen up the restrictions. The argument for keeping Norman from mogging cloth or mail or plate or something other than a dagger is null and void.
This! Just let people mog whatever. It doesn’t give them any stat bonuses, so who cares? I remember some agrument people made that for PVP people wouldn’t be able to tell what class you were, or some similar b.s., and that some how gave people an advantage? So just mouse-overs don’t work in PVP? we all know that Priests can’t wear plate, and that anything less than plate handicaps a warrior… so what was the kerfluffle about?
I would love to be able to transmog Kina in some mail and leather, and give her more of a berserker look.
I never bought that argument that you couldn’t tell what class. You can look at the casting or attack animations to tell.
IKR! I just never understood why they wanted to get so serious on that stance. They had already blown immersion and lore to hades and back by that point. And lets be honest, they had already given up trying on class fantasy. Once they pulled those class specific quests, that was over. It all just seemed like a giant tempertantrum to me.
I’m going to continue my practice of going to bat for scorned people here, but I honestly don’t think it was all that bad. I certainly think that era of WrA history is funny, but I also know that clumsy RP is usually the fault of an underdeveloped sense of self-expression than lingering malice.
I think a lot of RPers begin by imitating tropes and characters they’ve liked before. A lot of people are drawn to edgy characters because being confident, powerful and attractive is probably the most common power fantasy out there. There’s a reason a lot of WoW’s characters are super muscular, cool-looking people with a lot of exposed skin.
Piece by piece, the imitation falls away and the player comes up with more original ideas. And that means that, at some point, they will likely occupy this weird, confused, edgy persona where they aren’t quite sure who they are.
You know, like teenagers.
And you see this in art across the board. Fanfic writers eventually come up with novelists of their own. Artists who started because they wanted to draw Goku eventually create original work.
Imitation is the beginning of the artistic life cycle. The desire for self-expression is a complicated and important one and I, personally, am happy enough to let people be messes and figure it out.
Let she who is without a cringe OC cast the first stone.
I don’t disagree. Perhaps if would have been better if I said a few rather than some.
Experiences do vary. There was a time, when I didn’t have a job and was on at odd hours. I encountered some odd rp from time to time.
There were people who were basically trolling. Just wild rp waaaay outside lore, common sense, and the laws of physics. They would get started near or in the middle of existing RP trying to either disrupt it, or get a rise out of people.
There were new RPers, along the lines of what you described, spreading their wings for the first time with varying degrees of success. I usually tried to cut them a little slack, because we’ve all been there. You have to start somewhere and RP can be very difficult and scarey at first. I think if most people are honest, we’ve all had our edgy phases. But most of us sort ourselves out with time and experience. That’s fine. But there are people who like being difficult and lean into it.
And I’ll be quite honest, back 15 years ago there were some very elitest RPers in the Tauren community (singling out Tauren because that is basically all I have ever played) and they would sometimes do disruptive and mean things. I was a victim of that in one of my first RP attempts. I made some lore and time line mistakes, and I was roasted ICly in say at the pond. While they were also roasting me OOCly in whispers. I later learned that they had done that to several new Tauren RPers, including a friend of mine.
Anyway, TLDR: Yes, the Rpers you mention are there - most of us have been them. I was not speaking of them. I believe in supporting them - in my experience most of them are nice people. But they aren’t everyone. And there are people who have caused negative experiences on purpose. I obviously have some darker experiences than other people.
I was never a Breeder Guy but I was a Wise Druid Guy when I was a teenager, which meant I spent a lot of time RPing in a sort of judgy way about how my fellow Night Elves had forsaken their traditions to act like humans and spent a lot of time ranting about how we all had to go back to our Forest Ways and abandon the decadent human cities (while RPing every day in the Stormwind park because I couldn’t do walk up anywhere else).
It was a relatively mild form of Guy I guess but looking back it was a fairly lame character (his main trait was complaining about how other people act, so yeah…) and it probably did represent some sort of dorky teenage developmental way of working through not being one of the cool kids at school/enjoying the amenities of human urbanism rather than forests? Also as a teenager I had a vague notion that I would go live as a survivalist in the woods because I couldn’t live in Society and maybe druids were appealing for that reason. I read My Side of the Mountain so I knew it could be done
But yes RP communities need to have some room for people being big ol goobers as long as they’re not being super harmful.
Yeah, the whole “Silhouettes at a glance” thing which went out the window the minute they made Pandaren cross-faction.
Pandaren, then the Ren’dorei, then the Shal’dorei, then the Zandalari, then we got the onesies which further muddied the waters on the topic.
No serious PvPer is worried about ‘PvP Silhouettes’ when it comes to rated battles, you cannot tell me that in all seriousness.
And yet, even through all of the changes that have negated their ‘argument’ 10x over…they keep the restrictions in place.
People always refer to other games as the “wow killer” but honestly, they don’t need another game to kill them. They do it to themselves.
It was a exceedingly abstract place where our minds were forced to use weird placeholders and create a narrative that allowed us to stay sane. What we saw wasn’t what we were actually seeing and what happened didn’t actually happen. Instead we were just mortals moving through and fulfilling unknown objectives for primordial forces and all we gout out of it was having our strength sapped and our power faded due to it being a realm of death.
The Jailer didn’t actually exist nor was he behind every awful thing that ever happened in the WoW universe. Uther wasn’t some cringe edglord dude stoking rebellion, dead souls don’t turn into giant blue humans, there’s no zombie realm of eternal battle, Castlevania never happened and we didn’t go around taking care of soul seeds and fighting worms. There was no attempt to kill the universe. It was all just our minds applying a sanity filter to everything so we didn’t go insane.
That’s all Shadowlands was.
I also remember a time when the Tauren community was just kind of mean and widely elitist. I rolled my druid Honani back in mid-WLK and he evolved as a very exuberant, roguish, irreverent young man who coped with trauma with bright humor and calculated vulgarity. He was seldom if ever mean-spirited: imagine if that Beastie Boys song “Make Some Noise” was a young bull and you’d basically have him.
And people just broadly hated him, hated me for playing him, constantly had some kind of criticism. “That’s not the way a druid behaves, you’re lorebreaking.” “druids can’t talk in animal form. lorebreaking.” “tauren don’t talk that way. lorebreaking.” “tauren never question their elders, ever, ever. lorebreaking.”
Nothing I did with him was ever right. Eventually he just stopped being fun to play, became a source of stress and sadness.
A lot of Tauren RPers used to be queerphobic as all get out too. Today it’s extremely common to see lots of tauren players openly identifying as some stripe of queer and that’s a wonderful modern development because yikes, my best friend once got confronted and informed that his tauren being gay was a violation of lore because “a noble savage tribal culture would never allow that.” I got kicked out of at least one guild OOC seemingly over some dispute that happened IC and later found out that guild leader and her friends just hated gays and was looking for an excuse.
Wild times. I don’t miss them.
That just used to be WoW in general. I think all the “Vanilla is spicy” Heterosexuals moved on to other games, allowing WoW to be a more inclusive space overall. Because at the start…woof. There was a lot of flak for deviating from what some players presumed were societal norms. Especially among the Elves, who as a community have historically had the absolute worst takes imaginable.
My uncomfortable truth was I tended to avoid a lot of elf players back in the day because of the two-headed monster of “elves would never allow anyone to be queer, their population must be rebuilt” or “I spend my time among the orcs because unlike OTHER elves, I’m not a (slur for gay men)”.
Yeah. It was always weird to me the insistence that a race that tended to live for hundreds if not thousands of years would be militantly heterosexual. Especially the Night Elves, who only recently stopped being full on Immortals.
I know everyone’s craving my opinion on this, so I’m going to say that the Phobic Elf problem actually was kind of a foreseeable result given how many gay jokes were being made about elves (many of them by Blizzard themselves).
But beyond that, the Incelves were kind of a localized problem limited to one or two whackos. They were bad. They were not as bad as the Kor’kron problem.
The elves would yell at you once, gripe about it and then leave. Kor’kron would follow you around, screaming homophobic slurs and making vulgar claims and then if you said anything, a sizable majority of the server would scold you for taking it too seriously.
It’s fun to revisit WrA’s weirdos, but let’s not act like they didn’t do what they did without the tacit approval of a large part of the community.