we are gone for several years and now we come back and Regent Lord and First Arcanist are officially married…and we all missed it…Thanks Jailer…
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Not exactly how that works, we come back from the Shadowlands THEN a time skip happens. But yeah, would be nice if we had a cutscene or something that actually shows these offscreen events… we likely attended the wedding but because it’s never shown we’re basically that one wedding guest at every wedding who got so drunk they don’t even remember it.
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This is also confirmed in dialogue between Greymane and Shaw. This dialogue also states that Anduin is still missing, post time-skip, and that Turalyon continues to hold the throne.
This will never be reflected in game, things will continue to be in Cataclysm stasis forever. Westfall will still be on fire, Astranaar will still be under attack by wind riders, etc. So it may as well not even happen at all because Blizzard won’t commit to it.
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So, does this mean Suramar is now a part of the Kingdom of Quel’Thalas? Or is Quel’Thalas and Suramar both a part of a new Highborne Empire?
Or does this marriage have no political ramifications because:
A) Lor’themar is not King.
B) Thalyssra’s position isn’t determined by lineage, but by merit.
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One of the few ships i support and Blizz doesn’t show their wedding 
!?
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My heart is just so full from this dialogue. Good for them!
I wonder what their child will look like? 
I’m pretty irritated by the timeskip. It’s a lazy device for jumping ahead in the narrative without having to actually do all that annoying intervening storytelling that could have massive repercussions for roleplayers. I am honestly probably not going to recognize it because I tend to play out the day to day lives of my characters and I don’t want to either assume that either they were on auto-pilot for an ill-defined “several years” or have to story out all the neat things that they got up to that I didn’t actually get to play and had to skim over. I’m unsatisfied by both options.
But then that begs the question, what is everyone else going to do? You’re going to have some people jumping ahead like “WOW, I HAVEN’T SEE YOU IN FOUR YEARS WHY DIDN’T YOU GET IN TOUCH I’M SO MAD AT YOU” and some who are like, “…huh?”
Not that Moon Guard has ever been what I’d call big on following the game’s story closely, but a canonical time skip is a big deal. Will the big server projects recognize it? What about everyone’s individual guilds, friends and partners? This is a story hand grenade, from the perspective of regular log-in-every-day high continuity roleplayers.
From what I’ve heard the scenes playing out in the Alpha are still very much in flux. I hope they don’t do this. They can completely have had Lor’themar romancing Thalyssra in the background of the events of Shadowlands where it’s not like either one of them was really onscreen doing a ton of stuff anyway if they want to jump to “suddenly married”. It seems like mostly they’re doing this so they can say that Anduin was missing for yeaaaaaars and that just seems like a dumb reason when they’ve already established that time runs differently in the Shadowlands.
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Personally I think the timeskip is the most sensibile thing. The idea that this was a world suffering from an apocalyptic scale war every year without every civilization revolting or collapsing (aside from the Undead I guess) from all their fighting aged males dying was past the point of ridiculous. Where do they even get the supplies for these ventures?
The alternative would be to have time actually go by in game without having a major event happening which obviously can’t happen because this is a video game, so they have to time skip, and given the state of the lore I think a soft “fresh start” is for the best.
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Does having “several years” pass one time at the end of the expansion that was canonically over when the last raid came out ago fix any of that? It’s not like generations of new soldiers were born and came to adulthood. It’s not like the world had time to regenerate Azerite or Anima or whatever the macguffin currency will be during Dragonflight.
It doesn’t matter much to you if you’re mostly playing Classic, but for RPers in the live game the assumption that everyone has suddenly skipped ahead an undefined number of years sets a nuclear device in the middle of ongoing continuity-based RP where there’s a Winter Veil every year and a Hallow’s End every year and mini-holidays and other observable landmarks of the passing of time on a regular calendar basis, because unless you get everyone roleplaying in the continuous live world to agree to go along with it (no chance of that) or everyone to agree to ignore it (also impossible) it’s going to turn into chaos on an interpersonal level.
“I heard people are going into the afterlife” and “What are you talking about I’ve heard no such thing!” is a plot point that can be courteously skirted. “We’ve been hanging out for four continuous years with no major turns or developments in our interpersonal relationship” versus “What, we just met last week??” is harder to sort out, especially even if it gets sorted out between two individual people, but what about the rest of the friendships and relationships that that person has?
Also difficult to work around, “This entire server project/guild is accepting the time skip” when you haven’t for your character, or vice-versa.
I don’t know if many day-to-day high interpersonal continuity RPers recognize most of the game’s canon anyway. But this plot point is already giving me a headache, especially since there were better, less disruptive ways to write an absence for Anduin into the plot.
I am super excited about the time skip! There is a lot of opporunity that opens up for the story team this way. I don’t see it as being a burden on my character that I haven’t already experienced for the last almost 17 years I have played her. The game’s timeline was progressing slower than the real-life time for a while. And did some weird pause shuffle who knows what around WOD. Several times I just had to adjust my character’s age to fit the weird construct of time. How is this any more or less messed up? It really isn’t.
As far as what a player’s character accepts versus another’s versus a project’s in terms of timeline, etc. How is that any different than things like accepting that you can or cannot waltz in and out of the Shadowlands or that there are suddenly 100s of San’layn running around Stormwind like it is no big deal or commoners run the Kingdom of Stormwind or all death knights, regardless of generation, are so full of emotions and want to be in relationships.
People are going to play what they want anyways.
This will not kill roleplay just like nothing else has killed roleplay despite the end is near, doom and gloom posts, that have happened since the dawn of the game.
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I don’t think it’s going to “kill roleplay”, I just think it’s going to present hurdles and obstacles that could’ve been avoided by achieving the same plot effect (Anduin has been gone for a while) through other means (time runs different in the Shadowlands, which was originally the way they said they were going to go with it) than just dropping a timeskip on the roleplay community.
The previous years of your character’s life, you weren’t playing her. And even if you don’t play out every minute of her life now, I suspect that you don’t have regular several-year gaps in her ongoing storyline currently. So here’s the question - how are you personally going to handle the timeskip for Persefani? Will you recognize it and play along with it?
What about in the storyline of your guild? What if some individual people in your guild don’t want to recognize the time skip for their characters?
What about your long-term partners? What if one or more of Persefani’s good long-term friends or partners doesn’t make the same choice as you do re: recognizing a timeskip?
I can see how for characters that are a bit more up in the air with more flexible interpersonal situations, the opportunity to do a soft reboot after a handful of years of summed-up activity to put them in a different place and different circumstances could be an exciting possibility from a story perspective, I can. But my characters have a lot going on that would all need to be dealt with.
I have two characters that are married with small children, who actively interact with their spouses-played-by-other-RPers and NPC kids every day. I’m not keen on auto-piloting several years in their kids’ lives or in their marriages, but I’ve never been a ‘fast forward the pregnancy and kids’ kind of player. Both characters have a lot of intricate, inter-related ongoing plots involving like a couple dozen characters, PCs and NPCs, that couldn’t and wouldn’t just hang out for a few years unresolved or in stasis that I don’t want to just hastily wrap up or summarize either. One is dealing with a cult disrupting their land…disrupting the “friendly” cult that already exists on the land, on top of an ancient entity. One is dealing with unearthing a series of hidden caches of history, supplies and occasionally people left on a string of worlds that the Draenei fled through, each one brings up a ton of new plot snarls and people and situations that usually lead to several other cascading stories.
Could I usher those storylines to a stopping point by the end of the year? Mmmmmaybe. Having to write a “pause” into the plot could be done, of course. I’m creative as all hell, and I could probably get my primary RP partners on board. But having to do it, or work out if I’m going to do, is an enormous hassle that I’d rather not have, and it’s the kind of conversations that anyone who does continuous, continuity-based RP is going to have to deal with. But then, if I ignore the time skip, what are the server projects that they participate in going to do? What about their extended network of friends, enemies and associates? What about guilds and other groups that they interact with?
It’s all, like I’ve said, a hand grenade that throws everything into disarray. When the developers easily could’ve just…not. And while it certainly doesn’t spell out the end of all RP forever or anything, it’s a hassle that makes me cranky.
100% will be going along with the time skip. Considering I and my guild never respected Shadowlands as a place we could go in and out of, none of our RP included it. So we just had a life on Azeroth. That will just be continued through the years to the point where we are actively ‘live’ acting again.
We will recognize the time skip, but since our guild has a massive living story with tons of red strings at any given second, the storytellers of the guild will probably just ‘auto resolve’ some of those red strings as things that took part while we were off-screen (in the skip). This is communicated to everyone to allow for them to write it into their story or maybe they took a long vacation or whatever they want to write. Then the members can choose what they want to do with said information, what they would have been a part of or learned doubt second hand, etc etc. But the key here is communication.
As far as people that don’t want to recognize the skip, then they may no longer be a good fit for the guild. It happens. Just like people that wanted to ICly be to Shadowlands, we didn’t recognize it as a place for people to waltz in and out of. Worked out fine for all. They find a place that fits their playstyle and we continue with ours.
If this happens it will be addressed if it needs to be but as far as her partner, not a risk as we have hoped for this skip since it was announced before the release of Shadowlands. If another acquaintance or long-term friend feels like ignoring it, Sefi will smile and nod just like she does today with people that talked about having tea in Shadowlands for the afternoon.
In the end, I don’t think anyone needs to ‘skip’ time. You can still write your stories that took place during that time off-screen (skip). It is really no different than making a new character and writing a backstory saying you fought in Outlands but you boosted them today. So you write what happened in those couple of years. It may not be as ‘fun’ as acting it out at the moment, but there isn’t this solid end and start with missing time.
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This.
I too plan on going along with the time skip when it hits. Filling in the gaps is as relatively simple as just going and living a normal life for a while for the first time in a long time. And then figuring out the details from there-on in. Hell, it’s not like we’re going INTO Dragonflight with some world/cosmos shaking nemesis rearing their head again. It’s an expedition! So that right there even means that everyone and their mother may not necessarily be taking the first boat/zeppelin/portal/etc out to the Isles ICly. There’s no full on call to arms at launch.
All that aside though. I feel it gives people some leeway to work with in the end.
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In the end, I don’t think anyone needs to ‘skip’ time. You can still write your stories that took place during that time off-screen (skip). It is really no different than making a new character and writing a backstory saying you fought in Outlands but you boosted them today. So you write what happened in those couple of years. It may not be as ‘fun’ as acting it out at the moment, but there isn’t this solid end and start with missing time.
Yea, it’s this. This really isn’t some grand dramatic thing. It’s no ‘worse’ for RP than the fact that in canon all this mess since Vanilla has been happening in one year chunks or so. You can write stories that happen during the skip, nobody’s saying to treat this like non-existent void time.
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Okay, but this is the big question - what if some of the people in the guild say that they’re not doing a timeskip for their characters? No stories, no autopilot, they’re just not going to recognize that several years suddenly passed. What happens to the stories that they personally have been involved in, especially if there’s a handful of people all in the same plot, and some skip and some don’t?
Just to put it out there, I’m sure the answer isn’t “They get KICKED because they HAVE TO!” Working out the disconnect is possible, obviously, it’s just unnecessary mental gymnastics that didn’t have to happen as far as I’m concerned, and the fault lies with whoever is doing the writing for Blizzard.
Or, I can not recognize that time has skipped ahead at all, the way that people have ignored other parts of the game canon because I don’t want to skim over a few years of my characters’ lives, even if I could do a flashback montage of the highlights if I super wanted to. I imagine that a lot of people will choose that, especially people who hardly pay attention to the game’s canon story anyway. They won’t even realize what the implications of the plot are on their characters.
All I’m saying is, for those that do dig in on the game’s story that they notice that a time skip happened, hashing out the implications for everyone’s characters and the characters and organizations that they interact with is going to be a gigantic hassle that didn’t have to be inflicted on people.
I think I love you alliance lady, took all the words right from my head
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I’m glad for a time skip, personally. As much as I enjoy live time, day to day roleplay, being able to enact big changes that I’ve wanted for my character without having to wait years is a nice surprise.
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you ‘can’ not recognize it, yea, but that’s gonna be pretty hard to pull off. Like, yea, I’m sorry but most people are going to acknowledge it and it’s going to be part of the base world status quo. Shadowlands was easy to ignore because it was literally a magic side-realm you could only enter by a specific magic portal, you can completely ignore it way easier than ‘it’s objective lore fact that multiple years have passed, and we will be acknowledging the timeline’.
Like, if you can find a group who’s also down for that awesome, that’s great for you and I hope you have fun, but it feels weird to try to make some kinda elaborate ‘gotcha’ out of it that keeps circling back to ‘well what if I want to ignore that?’ when the only answer is ‘well my character will likely think you’re very weird and tbh I’m not sure how you’ll interact with the ‘greater world’ but enjoy if that’s your bag?’
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