I know I’ve brought this up before but you sometimes have to consider time zones.
I’m not going to deny that WRA RP is dwindling because I’m not even logging on to confirm or deny anything but I will say I used to play both Horde and Alliance on MG during MoP and I had a hard time finding stable RP because I didn’t play during peak server time.
At the time guilds also had insanely strict attendance rules or weird complex IC initiation processes that kept me from joining guilds and finding stable RP. Yet it really just boiled down to, I didn’t log on most of the time until 10-11pm server time when most guilds or events had long ended and my RP pickings were slim and sometimes even questionable.
SMC and Org were usually pretty quiet or dead at times and Alliance was a mix bag. Sometimes I’d find some fun and interesting walk up RP, other times not so much.
I logged onto my night elf a few weeks ago and I was surprised at how bad it was. Since I’ve been on Horde since Nightborne came out, I didn’t realize what was going on. That night I went over to MG just to see (I used to play Alliance there for many years) and it was insanely busy, busier than I had seen in years. This made me pretty sad for WRA where we all RP and love to be.
So what can we do to fix this and how can Horde help? I’m sure there’s plenty of us that play both sides and have Ally alts.
That killed my interest in Final Fantasy RP. I played up to level 53 at the moment. Walk-up RP just isn’t there and I tried joining a Discord and was ignored. Playing on Mateus at the moment and Balmung is pretty much the Moon Guard’s Lion’s Pride Inn, but the whole server.
I’ll admit, I really need to be hyper focused if someone walks up and uses /say to say something or emotes at me in a crowded place. Since there’s no speech bubbles, I lose track pretty quick of who said what. (Turning on timestamps helped this out tremendously).
As far as walkups, if it isn’t netting you results, I’d suggest checking the party finder - lots of RP events are advertised there and it’s easier to get results at those than say, going to the quicksand.
Concerning Balmung being the Lion’s Pride Inn, but the whole server, you’ll find that many players are more open about their 18+ engagements than in WoW. That sort of mentality, however, will cause you to lose out on a lot of Balmung’s events that aren’t “entertainment” related.
If you’d like a friend to traipse through Eorzea with, I am Artoriel Evardoux - Malboro server.
What the heck is up with all these trial accounts? Last few nights I can find 4 different trial characters just chilling in the Valley of Honor. Are people RPing and just not paying for a sub anymore?
Seriously? There’s a ton of walk-up across all of Balmung Ul’dah, and even Balmung Ishgard, Mateus Quicksand or Reunion on Mateus for Xaela roleplayers. The walk-up scene is more vibrant in FFXIV than it is in WoW. There’s certainly far more players involved.
I don’t know. I’ve been mulling it over, and I just don’t know. The whole point of walk-up RP is that it’s unplanned and spontaneous. Hosting public RP events in SW, setting up something like a “Random RP Friday” to encourage people to interact in SW more, it all runs counter to the organic spontaneity that defines walk-up RP.
I think all anyone can do at this point is wait for the next expac (which will, hopefully, be better than this one) and hope things haven’t hit too critical of a tipping point.
I can only go from my own experiences. It’s fine, though. I’m returning to WoW on an alt and unlikely to go back. The gameplay itself wasn’t my jam, so I’m not getting too invested.
It’s really wild to see someone explaining walk-up RP in such terms. The last time I saw anyone speak of spontaneity, they were… firmly, angrily insisting that “spontaneity in RP is a bad thing and if you go looking for it, you’re a creeper.”
For whatever reason, RP seems to attract a lot of people who have very weird opinions.
I once saw someone describe wanting to expand world RP as “inviting abuse” because more people out roleplaying in the world = fewer people roleplaying in major cities, leaving those who prefer city-based alone and without a support network, which could lead to them becoming emotionally compromised and thus more vulnerable to manipulation.
My mental state after reading that is best described by this image:
Risky take here but one of the reasons I unsubbed is because I just got really fed up with that very thing.
Just… that certain element of the RP community (really any RP community) with the most backwards bizarre ideas and caustic attitudes to go with them. The “if you seek RP without a lengthy OOC introduction and scheduling, you’re an abuser because ‘spontaneity’ means abuse” claim was among the weirdest but sadly not that rare. Maybe it’s because the population is thinning and more reasonable folks are shifting to other factions, other servers, or other games. But my god I just could not deal with it anymore. Some people can’t just chill out and play a game.
Not going to lie - I prefer the atmosphere of RP servers than actually RPing myself. It’s mostly just having a comfortable blanket of people who are taking things semi-seriously with names and interactions…for the most part. (General and Trade Chats will always be hives of scum and villainy)
Actual RPing, especially my latest interactions in which, have generally been insisting I adhere to very strict fanons (that I have no previous knowledge of) or people who fail to comprehend the principle part of freeform roleplay is the idea of consent. (No, I don’t care that you are playing the role of a Stormwind Guard. I’m here to drop some stuff off at the auction house and indulged your walk up before I went to do my own thing. I don’t care that you find my character’s transmog suspicious, I’m bound by no oath that says I have to walk my character to the Stockades entrance for “interrogation”. Just because I decide to interact with you doesn’t mean I am suddenly locked into your story.)
Yeah, fanon is great, I have a lot of wild fanon I operate with, but it’s strictly opt-in for strangers and always has been. It has to be. The playing field has to be level or it’s one-sided and unfulfilling.
I have well and truly lost count of how many absolute losers have attempted to force my character into their preferred outcome, even in conflicts or exchanges that were never invited or even hinted at. Guard RPers are some of the absolute worst for this, too. Once upon a time I was more likely to humor strangers for IC conflicts but over time I just got sick of things like
rando orc trying to force himself bodily on an elf woman (yes, exactly the way you think) and then throwing a tantrum OOC when my mage violently intervened (“X JUST FREAKING DIES I GUESS, WHATEVER”)
rando orc not only godmoding away everything my warlock emoted, he even retroactively godmoded an instantaneous spell cast he could never have known
a specific grimtotem godmoding away literally everything done to him in a group RP combat encounter to the point that I exploded OOC and told him off
So when I stopped bothering with these and began avoiding IC fights? Hohoho. Kor’kron snipers deciding my character was just autokilled according to their choice, DK Generals rolling in out of nowhere to try to force my DK to shut up and leave, forced muggings and attempted mana-sucking and on and on and on
and you know what eventually I just don’t even bother going IC? and the common vein with all of this is the perpetrator, almost without fail, gets SCREAMING mad OOC if they don’t get to just kill you or violate you or whatever
I don’t miss this garbage. It was so common, too. I just had no more patience for what’re essentially 8 year olds who want to bash their armless he-man into your knuckles and then burst their grandma’s eardrums with their hysterical shrieking should you say “no thanks”
In the past, oh, couple of years? I’ve definitely noticed some people have developed very weird ideas about when and why you should shoot someone an OOC /whisper.
Y’all really don’t need to /whisper me before approaching my character. You can just… approach them. That’s why I’m IC flagged in Stormwind!
On the other hand, you should /whisper me if want to, say, march my character off somewhere or pick their pocket or anything like that. Chances are? I’ll READILY and EAGERLY agree to participate if you just ask me first.
Is it weird that part of me misses that era of RP? It wasn’t, like, good or anything, don’t get me wrong, but there was something deeply amusing about logging into Stormwind and being immediately sniped by some night elf rogue on a roof somewhere.
Oh yes. Last I saw it had become almost mandatory to establish some OOC introduction or permission to approach, and if you don’t, you go take a long walk off a short pier. Maybe I’m too old school but I remember when it was okay to just walk-up, especially when one has “walk-ups welcome” in their desc mod.
I eventually just took my RP to discord. It’s quiet 90% of the time but at least there’s zero stress.
It was at least interesting in the sense that it meant things were happening in the game. When it comes to annoying Kor’kron godmoding, I don’t miss that but I do miss that the game’s story facilitated it and thereby got people engaged, if in a scummy and exhausting way. We have -nothing- now. Absolutely nothing.
That’s probably it, yeah. The era of the rooftop sniper was definitely when random RP seemed to be at its height. You couldn’t RP walk in Stormwind without getting mixed up in something.
Said something wasn’t always good, or even intelligible, but at least stuff was happening.
edit: oh god shadowlands actually has me thinking “gosh remember all those dumb plague events?? that was kinda fun haha” this expansion has ruined me y’all are gonna need to put me down soon
See, I got really good at weaving stories for my characters, which at times spun fairly far from the baseline game story if maintaining the world or at least the cosmology. But time was, I could deal with bland or outright bad story content because my characters interested me more anyway, and so did the collision and interplay between different characters and their personalities.
But Shadowlands is… nothing. It’s an actual nothing sandwich. It’s so boring it sapped even my will to go on. Really chapped my posterior too because I’d just cooked up three new characters to play around with (two Grimtotem bothers and a quirky Shadowmoon mystic) but the population had begun to thin and I just couldn’t work with the absence this expac has been. I almost wish I’d gone Alliance but I was too invested.