The RP Community Megathread

Wyrmrest Accord
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Yeah, actually, thinking on it flying should be made impossible in large cities. Have the alliance or horde be able to use chokepoints and bottlenecks. Make the attackers think about where to attack from and the defenders should have plenty of options to keep them contained.

You know, this is a bit of a stretch goal but I’d like to have a PVP area introduced in the world that incentivizes clever strategy. Like having walls that can’t be scaled, traps, weapon emplacements that add a tactical bent to doing this or that

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There is actually a game that was either in development or is out now or something but I think its called Ashes of Creation? I don’t really have the time or energy or mind to really get immersed in another world or play it for the sake of playing an MMO, but it had this concept around guilds actually taking over castles or cities in event where guilds fight over the ability to hold and own that property for a certain amount of time.

I know that this game also has housing, as well as instanced apartment buildings where you have your own smaller dwelling if you dont want a home or want to live more in the city, closer to your guild…I think.

I think they also have a religious experience “profession”, where your worship experience is leveled up as you progress with it.
It had a lot of neat concepts. Unsure what state it is in now, but I’m sure its a lot easier to impliment these ideas at the ground level then going into a game that had none of this and trying to do it right.

But I have no insight on what the rp climate is like in this game or if it has any at all. Again, I don’t care much to play it and I haven’t thought about it until right now.

But I agree with the “RP Mode” might separate people. This is what housing could potentially do. It’s why I’d rather see more places that are hidden behind scenarios and instances to be made more open with more places to explore first than a housing system that will make everyone disappear.

I’ve never really been into the “RP Mode” phase idea, but more so…specific places having the option to toggle into a safe version of that area like Suramar or even some quest areas that would be pretty if not for the ingrained fel, blight, decay or corruption that ruined it.
(Like cmon…let me enjoy the statue of Malorne as a non-druid without wading through Satyr if I completed the Val’sharah campaign.)

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Taking over cities would probably be the butts for RP in those cities but maybe frontier forts or townsteads would work

Old executions of that like warden tower or other spots didn’t work because people phase through each other in WoW’s engine, so a small party can’t hold a large group at a pass without being totally run over, but I genuinely think that if you tried to make a World PVP zone that had options for tactics and strategies beyond bullrushing an objective it could be done

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Sharding has been the bane of my roleplay schtick in a lowbie leveling area. Before Chromie Time, I would help out levelers and in turn, they would realize that I was here roleplaying and either had a cool unique experience to treasure, or would come back later when they weren’t leveling to roleplay more. Now when I look at the TRP map and see little player dots that I’ve never seen before, I need to play the “Chromie Time guessing game” of if they’re actually on my shard or not.

Let me spook levelers, Blizzard. LET ME SPOOK LEVELERS.

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226

RP-Useful Toys & Items Durations

There are SO many toys and other items that we role-players WISH we could use for role-play more. For example, those race-themed tents we got in WOD. Sticking with the tents, they have a horrid duration and only work on DRAENOR. If we could have their duration made indefinite and their placement changed to anywhere in the game, that’d be amazing! Think of how awesome it would be to be able to plonk your blood elf-themed tent down during some adventure RP, or perhaps you could coordinate with friends and make a big military cams using them. Point being, SO many items NEED to be re-assessed through the optics of role-play function.

Hostile Mob Management

Let’s look at Suramar City for a moment. This could also apply to parts of Borlaus and dungeon and raid areas ; but Suramar City is the big one. Suramar City is FULL of hostile mobs. Give us role-players the ability to turn the hostile mobs in an area we—or our group—is in neutral. Let me be clear: I don’t want all mobs phased out; I want them neutral. Being able to make them neutral would allow us to still have the illusion of a busy place—the option to have the NPC’s as backdrop pieces in our RP.

Buildings & RP

Let’s look at Stormwind. You have HEAPS of big, open taverns to RP in. Now shift your eyes over to Orgrimmar and… every other Horde place. We’re lucky if we get chairs, let alone big halls to RP in. Please—for the love of all that is holy—give Horde RPers chairs and big places in our cities to RP!

Guild Customisation

More tabard designs and icons please. They haven’t been updated since VANILLA!

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227

Complete Armor Sets

A great example for this one is the Kirin Tor themed sets that come from Ulduar and some of the Naxx plate sets. They are incomplete. PLEASE complete them. It SUCKS to have a set you love, but there is no way to get the boots OR there WAS a way to get them once upon a time, but something happened, and you can’t complete the set anymore. Don’t worry about getting creative with getting the missing pieces to us; just make the missing pieces cosmetic items and put them on a new vendor in each expansion’s capital.

Flags and Banners

I want an Ebon Blade flag that works JUST like the awesome PvP faction pennant toys we can get. No duration—they last until you die or dismiss please.

Last Names and Apostrophes

Please, let us put apostrophes in names and allow us to have cosmetic last names. SO many blood elves, for example, have names with apostrophes in them. Let us mimic this to increase immersion.

Q&A’s with the Role-Play Community

We exist. We’ve had PVP, PVE, and Lore (please bring lore Q&A’s back) Q&A’s before; but NEVER one for RP. Please, we have a lot of interesting things to say—great perspectives on how WE play the game and how we can help YOU make it better for role-players. Give us some visibility to your developers—offer us your ear. We are some of your most dedicated players. We want to help make our particular experience better; just ask us—show us that you care.

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I don’t play WoW anymore, and I probably won’t play an Activision-Blizzard game again until Kotick is fired and Blizzard stops being a cancerous mockery of a gaming studio, but a few things.

World Revamp: Consider we have the much-vaunted Phasing System in WoW. It wouldn’t be too hard for Blizzard to just phase the entirety of the old world and, given their penchant for reskinning old models, repopulate the ‘new world’ with enlarged cities, altered creatures and new questing hubs without it being a drastic expansion of resources.

Would it be expensive and time consuming? Yes. Would it be as destructive and exhaustive as the cataclysm revamps? No.

Remove some widgets from the map surface here, replace it with trees and rocks. Swap out the cave there for a mine. Add the cave systems, which are all rehashes of each other, to this mountain and turn it into a crude city. Stop trying to wow the players with shiny new things and instead make the map fun and explorable, add time sensitive phenomena like nocturnal/diurnal flora and fauna that might only spawn or be available at certain in-game times of the day.

Best of all, it’s Phased. The old zones are still there, you can go talk to a Bronze Dragon in the Zone and go back to the previous iteration of the region and get whatever you wanted to get from the area, then talk to the Bronze Dragon again and poof, back into the grind.

Player Impact: Players want to be differentiated from their fellows. Situations like the Horde Rebellion, the Sylvanas Follower/Rebel option, all of these are monumental decisions that, sadly, never really matter in the story.

Players get to choose dialogue options in certain quests and story events. Options give players a -2, -1, 0, +1 or +2 to a hidden system based upon the nature of their answer. Be pro-war, get a -2. Be pro-peace, get a +2. Fall somewhere in the middle, get a -1, +1 or a 0. As the story progresses, your options may not necessarily change the story’s overall arc, but your character becomes known for their choices. Some NPCs may spit when you enter the room, or cower when you walk past. Others may salute, or turn away in shame. Others might toss you a piece of fruit or a mug of ale, or point you out to their children and say “There goes WaffleMunch, Champion of Gnomeragon!” if you pass them by.

Certainly, the story may progress from A to B because of raisins, but still, a simple system that allows players to influence at least how the world around them reacts to that character, and explore how their alts might be treated by choosing different options, could be a very neat way to give players that fun little nod to their choice without derailing the story department into writing dozens of different endings and then trying to tie them all up neatly to progress to the next arc of the story.

The option might also open up new avenues in PvP and PvE scenarios, where NPCs might be friendly, or at least neutral, rather than openly aggressive because of your choices. Hidden vendors might open up if you show naked blood-thirst towards the other faction, or choose a path of peace and tolerance. Leader/Champion NPCs might have unique dialogue options and may offer access to unique seasonal scenarios that might not award ILevel gear, but transmog, pets and achievements to help while away downtime as the devs work on the next patch or expanson.

Player Housing: We have Pandaren Scenarios. We have Island Expeditions. It is not going to be too difficult for WoW to create housing in this situation, and can even have multiple different housing options, including Guild Halls that require a staggering amount of gold to purchase, but might offer exceptional RP potential and, in a pinch, might be used for PvP purposes, having rival guilds attacking each other’s bases without needing to create another battleground. Give players an investment not only in gold and resources, but emotional and pride reasons as well.

AND DO NOT TIE THE HOUSING TO A SINGLE EXPANSION. Make it multi-expansion, make it so that players/Guilds can put in buildings taken from Warlords of Draenor, Mists of Pandaria, Battle for Azeroth and more, if they can find the patterns, scrounge enough resources and convince the faction in question to build the structure for them. Make it tied to reputation, give players a reason to go back and pound the sand in older expansions, give Blizzard more playtime that has fun, that has a meaning, other than boredom and achievement-hunting.

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229

You know, I was going back to see if I couldn’t find some of the WPvP videos/machinima the server made back in the day of a lot of those encounters to share, and I found them, but some of them sure did not age well. Ya know, 2010-2016 wow/internet ‘humor.’ Some actually poorly aged humor, others maybe a bit more of a veil for latent phobias, isms, and the like. So I’ll just leave those at that unless there is an interest. They are great, but some things kinda deserve to stay in the vault or need the context of when and where.

The point of them, though, was to show that yeah, it was amazing and we had a great time, even if you were being ganked or camped. There was a sense of self moderation for bad actors, of community whenever you were killed or found someone, a bit of respect knowing that yall are just here to play a game (if you weren’t a bad actor/griefer).

I remember going on a month, or even months, long campaign with me and a few friends attacking and going back and forth with this orc guild (Blackrock Clan if I remember right) who claimed Redridge. Did we maybe go too far a few times? Yes. We would fight them for maybe a bit too long or 3v7 their members. WOD Arcane mage OP. But did Redridge turn into a hotbed of RP and WPvP? Absolutely. There was an upstart orc guild (Like 5 members, maybe 1 max character. IDK why its always orcs) that just blanket claimed Ashenvale. The night elf guilds got involved, the orcs asked others to help, so more Horde came, then more Alliance came, and then it was all out brawls, skirms, and RP in Ashenvale almost entirely unplanned for months. I can say the same thing about Silvermoon and Eversong, Hinterlands, Stranglethorn, Arathi, Twilight Highlands, Southern Barrens, Feralas, Stonetalon, the list could probably go on to some extent or another.

An important thing was, of course as is all RP, interest, want, communication, and persistence. We made these things happen because we wanted to RP, we wanted to get out in the world, and we wanted to fight. But also we knew people would be there. Not if they would be on the same shard as, if they had War Mode on or off, but just there existing in the world, which is the real key that we’re missing. We’re going to need an accessible open world again, all within the same instance on the same server. The mechanics, unfortunately, dictate the feasibility of anything like that coming back before peoples interest does.

So if its an interest and want, and this thread imo is a great start, gotta keep petitioning the devs, and hopefully through the Community Council who is a bit closer to their ears, to consider our game play style and maybe make RP servers an exception to some of their rules, within technical feasibility.

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Heh. Allow me to disagree, vehemently, with everything you just said.

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Oh yah you’re right, I wasn’t really picturing RP mode as a new shard but more like a flag you can toggle and you get more chat functions, less restrictions on toys and abilities and maybe hostile mobs either phase out or become friendly so you can utilize more of the world for RP. It’s like Chromie Time, I’m totally onboard for this choose your own adventure style leveling but I hate how it puts you into a separate shard from everyone else. Why?? Why would they do that??

The WPVP on ED sounded amazing though! We had something similar on WRA, maybe not to that extent but I remember World Defense (like you mentioned before) being pivotal to facilitating that RP. Guilds and groups whether you’re Horde or Alliance had their “turf” they would protect. I remember having geared characters parked in Crossroads or Brill because those were two constant spots always getting hit with Alliance attacks.

One of my favourite memories is I was farting around outside the Undercity on my rogue and a full on Alliance raid showed up to the gates. Some of them with folks from Moon Guard’s Blood of Lordaeron and I start seeing Paladins kneeling and emoting outside the gates, people buffing so you knew an attack was coming, an RP attack!! There was an RP PVP custom channel so I started letting people know and we rallied a defense and fought for a good hour or two in Undercity before the pesky Alliance took down Sylvannas. Sure we “lost” but it was so much fun!

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Friendly reminder that we have player housing in the form of the Halfhill market in Pandaria…

AND IT NEEDS TO BE EXPANDED UPON

I know territories and zone claims were popular on rppvp servers (ive seen the maps and the rp about asking permission to travel the land… very cool)

but MG and WRA never picked it up. pretty sure we had issues with powertripping individuals

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I wouldn’t call that player housing, it’s more like an instanced garden simulator. Not to say garden tending couldn’t be a feature added to player housing should player housing ever be added, but I’d rank Garrisons closer to player housing than Halfhill.

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Gentarn hit it on the head, we’ve had a few different things that were kinda player housing, but they were all designed to be temporary.

As far as I can remember the last time we had a multi-expansion side activity added was in MoP with pet battles. And in the mean time we’ve had two side activities removed, first aid (probably justified) and archaeology.

Avoiding systems that require regular updates and maintenance seems to be pretty core to the way things are designed now. And I get it, these side activities require work and they’re not always that important to players. I don’t really engage with the pet battle dungeons and stuff much myself, though I would argue that’s because pet battling is one of the least immersion-friendly kinds of sub-activities you could have. All of us might imagine our players fishing and cooking sometimes but training kittens to fight miniature sayaads and stuff is a bit too weird. Player housing, on the other hand, is one that I think would be uniquely valuable to players because it is such a natural extension of imagining your character as an inhabitant of this world.

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The Halfhill market needs to be expanded upon.

when they implemented it, it was used mostly for pandaria cooking. you buy seeds and grow the mats you need.

if we had them near our capitals, and able to buy seeds for the current exp mats itd always be relevant

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I wish pet battles didn’t feel so grindy. I think I tried it but then hit this wall when I realized I needed to level different types to defeat different challenger NPCs. If I could have a themed pet group that made sense to my character would be really fun and immersive. Like my undead having all undead pet teams or something y’know?

But I know we’re not talking about pet battles specifically but I agree, I wish it could be more immersion friendly, so I can RP in my head I’m a magic crystal space man and these are all my magic space crystal minions!

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I never played on a PvP server, but there used to be more RP-PvP on PvE servers too, and since I started playing WoW again I’ve wished that more RPers knew what an amazing platform PvP can be for RP. PvP is a dirty word on RP servers now, and for some legitimate reasons. And it’s never going to be everyone’s thing, but if Blizzard could make the faction conflict make sense and make gearing for PvP less intimidating (I would remove rating restrictions entirely for gear - giving players who are already better PvPers better gear does nothing but make PvP impossibly inaccessible for most players - it’s not like PvE where the gear is the incentive/reward and means of progression), more RPers might be willing to give it a shot and get to see what a perfect marriage of roleplay and gameplay it can be.

This underscores a lot of my and others’ points about how the best thing Blizzard can do for RP is just make the game better for everyone.

Also, please come here.

I knew that was a hot take, so no hard feelings. But let me ask you this: its convenience notwithstanding, how has flying made RP (or PvP, for that matter) better? Or even just not worse?

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It’s better because I can fly.

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Well, I can’t argue with that. :laughing:

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Flight is great for RP, though I am a bit of a ‘shill’ for flight so take me with a grain of salt, I suppose.

It provides access to spots you cannot reach by walking or jumping up the sides of mountains, and allows you to perch up on trees or buildings which you may otherwise be unable to access.

Quick movement to/from a RP location to another.

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Couldn’t this mostly be solved with better zone and terrain design that makes more places accessible?

It’s a double-edged sword. There are definitely fun things you can do and places you can access with flying. But I’ve been playing since the beginning of the game and saw first-hand what Cataclysm did to Azeroth. I miss seeing fellow travelers out in the world and feeling immersed in that travel. I miss being able to stumble into random RP outside Stormwind or places you can port to from Stormwind. We gained a few out-of-reach places and lost all the in-between places. I don’t think any of the conveniences are worth losing the adventure, the world. We never notice how all the little inconveniences help to create the immersion we crave until they’ve been QOL’d away.

But I’m as biased as anyone else, and I’m perfectly resigned after 11 or so years to the fact that I’m not going to get my way.

That’s why I think no flying in cities would be a good compromise.

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