As a “newer” person and guild on WrA, there’s infinitely more RP opportunities than on our dead server. We stayed there for years there in hopes of a merge or free transfers but none came. When we finally transferred, we did it two months before the lawsuit news hit. So we’re new-ish in the sense that we took our first WoW guild hiatus then since 2007 and came back recently.
Our server had its final mass exodus to WrA and MG in Warlords of Draenor. Even back then, the “MG is Alliance, WrA is Horde” designations still existed, but we chose WrA specifically in 2021 because we didn’t want a server that was overrun, had too stringent of server Lore, or had less room for opportunity. WrA seemed a better fit, it’s Alliance population was supposedly smaller but still healthy, and its culture suited us better than MG.
When the lawsuit happened and WrA was at the forefront of the in-game protests, even appearing in Forbes magazine with our huge group in Oribos, it felt like we finally made it. This is the kind of population and energy we wanted.
But it seems that just like we took a hiatus after that and 60 - 70% of us returned to WoW (the rest remain in GW2 or FFXIV), WrA is similar. Not everyone has returned to WoW, and word-of-mouth is powerful. If anyone asks on the forums where to find RP, “Moonguard is Alliance, Wrymrest is Horde” is the predominant answer, even by non-RPers. So for every returning player finding less people to hang with on their old servers, going to the places with more population is going to be a no-brainer.
To combat this, letting our own forums speak for themselves is major. Specifically: Posting outside of Discord. It was mentioned above in the thread, but Discords aren’t the first place people look for server health — it’s the forums. There’s been a definite increase of guild and RP event advertising here, and there’s always been good RPer/Lore banter in the short time I’ve been a member. One of the biggest mistakes our old server made was abandoning its server forums to trolls early on, and it’s something it never recovered from. When we tried to course correct it, too few people took it on and it was too late. Back then, it was less Discord that was the problem vs. community sites that replaced server forums altogether. These were community projects I loved when they first started, then became increasingly less supportive of when I started to see how they hermitted and stemmed the flow of new people to the RP community. A visitor would come to my old server forums, see nothing, and assume it was dead. Eventually, those forum visitors were right.
For my part, been jumping into existing walk-up RP and also helping start anchors in SW. While I’ve always been a big world RPer myself, I understand what it takes to make connections and bring new folks to a server, because I’ve been in a place where I watched the opposite. I’ve also been ideating on event ideas that would be more about making connections vs. guild promotion, because although we want new folks, we also want the community we chose to keep being fun and vibrant. Threads like this with open, sometimes raw conversation help me understand where things are, where me and my guild can fit, and where I can help.
But I also stress two things: First, embrace who/what you are, because it will come most naturally, and people gravitate to people having genuine fun. Second, and antethical to the first at first glance but follow me: Don’t be afraid to step one shade out of your comfort zone, as it sometimes can expand your who/what, and help others as well. So continue rocking at what you excel at, and add something new as a way to scale up and raise up WrA as well.