Why didn't RP survive in Classic?

Lore Story Forum
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After a couple months of trying to feel out what is and isn’t still alive in the Classic gamemodes, it seems like roleplaying didn’t survive the first few years. By 2022, Grobbulus’ culture shift was permanent - most of the Emerald Dream guilds that cemented it as ‘the place to be’ had gone back to retail, and mass transfers from dead or dying PvP servers diluted the culture into nothing. Enforcement for the actual written rule for RP-type servers in regards to character names and disruptive behavior vanished (and retrospectively, it’s shocking it was ever there - first time I’d seen it in use). Bloodsail Buccaneers retained life support population numbers through 2023, but has dwindled down to less than 500 active level 85 characters. Season’s Lava Lash didn’t survive and I’ve never even heard of an Anniversary RP realm.

We all know the story. In other words: Why did everyone go back to Retail?

One of the things that appealed to me and my friends the most about Classic was a chance to roleplay in a version of the setting that had a lot more open-ended story threads and in general a more grounded, familiar feel to the world. I’ve seen this sentiment echoed by other people, even on the forum, but the words never match up to the deeds: There’s really nothing left on those servers if you aren’t a part of a small group that probably bounces between multiple versions of the game. Grobbulus, BSB and Wild Growth (SoD) all have small Discord communities that are largely inactive and for the last year mostly coordinate meet-n’-greet or ‘bar RP’ style content. No big guilds, no big storylines, none of the stuff that makes an RP server feel ‘alive’.

The optimist in me (and others) wants to say that this all has to do with a combination of Cataclysm being abandonware and not especially liked, Anniversary being distilled into the least fun version of Vanilla via player culture, and now Season of Discovery being put out to pasture-- but it’s genuinely a little depressing to log into servers and only ever see the same five guys with TRP installed. I’m pretty sure it’s just the same guy’s characters. In that sense, it’s sort of like being one of the last neanderthals wondering where all the people like me went.

A more direct question is if people genuinely feel more comfortable and engaged with the storyline of World of Warcraft as-is in TWW. For me and the people I grew up playing the game with, it become impossible to reconcile a believable world or characters almost a decade prior as the writing became more high-powered and star character-focused, along with a shift towards ‘chosen one saved the world’ rather than ‘anonymous adventurers did this’.

Is there some massive elephant in the room I’m overlooking?

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To use that analogy, going back to classic was like Humanity reverting to a Neanderthal state. They didn’t like it so they came back to humanity.

It brings to mind what some have said before:

“You think you want it , but you don’t.”

There was much hullabaloo about Classic, but they wouldn’t stick around, once they got it.

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I’ll say that it also would come down to ease of access to RP areas and options.

Classic doesn’t have places like Pandaria, Kul Tiras, Zandalar, Northrend etc where you can RP at. Not to mention flying in the vanilla zones.

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The vanilla version of the game didn’t exactly have a lot of RP support systems.

Consider, for example, Transmog. That system didn’t exist at all until… what? Cataclysm? RP’ers had to keep RP sets separate from their gameplay sets, PvP sets, etc… This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that bag space was at a premium back then (16 slot bags being the biggest options).

Then there’s the dated visuals of the characters. The player character model updates were desperately needed, and one can see that by looking at Vanilla.

Add onto this that the roster of playable races is harshly curtailed, as well as character customization, and plenty of RP’ers would be turned off then and there.

Lastly, I think there’s a certain ennui to trying to RP in a version of the game when you know what the future holds. You can play a Night Elf back in their hay day, but you know Teldrassil gets torched 15+ years down the line. You could play an Orc back when the Horde was still honorable, but Garrosh’s shadow looms just over the horizon, and Sylvanas is standing two feet away.

Classic RP would be difficult to maintain at the best of times for the reasons listed above, as well as those mentioned by others. Zones would absolutely be a big one. Imagine trying to RP a Kirin Tor character, back when Dalaran is still under the bubble, for example.

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I should clarify that I’m mostly talking about Classic, now on it’s 6th year, about to go into Mists.

I don’t think this is totally true. People who played a lot of these expansions (Cataclysm, Mists, etc.) when they were contemporary probably still remember where all the ‘RP zones’ are, the empty houses, the weird flat pieces of terrain, stuff like that. I wouldn’t say Pandaria and other continents had more, either, unless there’s something I’m forgetting.

A strong case can be made for WoW never having RP support systems. We’re all still using TRP after 20 years! All the rest is true, but the game had a massive roleplaying population on MG and WRA during Cataclysm and Mists. It certainly wasn’t an issue then.

I think this is an interesting perspective and the opposite of what a lot of Classic players express. There’s enjoyment to playing older versions of the game and seeing it as an open-ended world where the story directions that were unfun or uninteresting later in the series simply don’t have to be dealt with.

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A lot of the private server crowd seemed less inclined to be the same as the rp crowd to begin with, tbh

It felt a lot more likely to be the people who had basically spreadsheeted every number in the game pre-Legion and wanted a redo of a game we played without knowing how anything worked (cough Onyxia cough) with total mechanical mastery in hand

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I was gonna quote most of what Solarion is saying here, but then I realized I pretty much agree with everything he said, so I just replied to it.

As far as hard-core RP? Like, RP-RP? I feel like it’s been niche for as long as I’ve been playing (So since the beginning).

I did used to RP a lot WAY back when, like, God, I must have been in my 20s. It was fun. I stopped typing to anybody ever in chatspeek because a fellow RPer told me that I should just start typing in sentences and there was no reason for me to be using chatspeek. But beyond that, when that little group busted up, I dunno, I just never really found another group that was as all-in so even way back when, I kinda abandoned it.

Then COVID, and then I was playing FFXIV at the time. And then the next thing I knew, my blonde Viera girl was the new upstairs bartender for a club that was so hopping we had an actual Twitch DJ with hundreds of viewers and a line at the door. And I mean, this wasn’t RP-heavy, really. My character was just serving drinks. AND I WAS GETTING PAID FOR IT. A LOT. Like, gil I could use for raids or new armor or to sink into a profession. And then, like, yeah, you’d have some ERP going on, depending on which club you were at, but still, that whole “club scene” in FFXIV had people RPing WAY more often, in far more numbers, in places so far better backed up for RP because of mansions/housings that would then be in-RP tea-houses, and bars, and clubs, and dance-clubs. FFXIV managed a perfect storm when we all had to be stuck at home and couldn’t do those types of things anymore, but you could do it, virtually, in XIV. And not just that, but everybody was doing it.

That, on top of the mod scene. Ooof, if you were ever going to get RP to really take off in a current-day MMO, it was FFXIV at the time. They were like a mountain compared to the mole-hill of support the RPers got in WoW at the time.

And I think that eventual collapse that happened in XIV when everybody was able to start going back to the club, or back to hanging out with friends IRL having a few beers, like, slowly, and unfortunately, all those clubs in XIV slowly died.

But if they didn’t have a chance, WoW -especially as Solarion here pointed out, using the systems in place during Classic? It didn’t stand a chance.

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Yes. the fact that Classic isn’t really that fun to play.

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I agree, and didn’t consider this, although I think it’s a smaller influence than we might think. There are a lot of people playing multiple versions of the game, specifically retail x SoD, retail x anni, etc.

It has always been niche, but the thread’s question is mostly how a server like Grobbulus can go from having 30 double-digit-member active RP guilds to nothing surviving whatsoever. I think the demography of RP online in general has changed a lot. A majority of the people on this forum are probably old enough to remember being inducted into this hobby through forums, tabletop games, or god forbid, MUDs.

The primary online funnels for RP games are now softcore ‘social’ RP games like GTA, RDR, DarkRP, VRchat, etc. It doesn’t really push people towards the “content creation” style of RP community - older WoW guilded stuff - as much as it does idly sitting in bars or seeing who’s IC in the Cathedral.

A lot of people clearly have an axe to grind with Classic, but that isn’t germane to the conversation. It has 270k active max-level characters. Smalltime compared to retail, but that’s still a quarter-million.

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Okay I’m not exactly young anymore but I’ll note there are still MUDs that are still ongoing (and I joined one briefly back when MUDs were already considered archaic because I was curious about what the ancestor of online rpgs was like)

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Classic subs carried this game through Shadowlands.

I can’t speak to the RP scene, but Blizz increasingly relaxed their position on the “warts” people wanted when they realized there was a buck to be made. They basically speedran the systems that put people off of the game to begin with in service of convenience. Or maybe that convenience was the only thing that kept it afloat for so long. I dunno. I’m reasonably well confident that no one wanted Classic with Retail comforts, though, because Retail is right there.

Then there’s the modern gamer mentality hellbent on optimizing and self-policing the fun out of the game. It turned into the same parse/rating crap you rampant in M+ and Raiding today. GDKP runs became the norm, which annihilated server economies. And that was before they added gold-buying direct from Blizz.

Classic had some pretty strong server communities early on, but when they opened up server transfers it evaporated. Horde was wildly overpopulated overall and the transfers ballooned faction imbalances even further than they were.

Finally, there’s the looming issue of … no new content at the end of the road means people will increasingly lose interest. I think Season of Discovery is probably a germ of a good idea, but I don’t know if Blizz is willing to capitalize on it. I think a better balanced “Classic” that explores an alternate timeline with a full development team behind it would do pretty well. As I understand it SoD just doesn’t have the resources to do more than tweaks and an occasional new dungeon/raid. The class changes went maybe a bit too far for my taste, but it was a cool experiment if nothing else.

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tbh barely even then. BC and Wrath barely made a dent in the Slands drop based on the few numbers available.

I think Season of Discovery is probably a germ of a good idea

Also yeah, the director they picked for classic had plenty of experience doing that stuff, she pretty much kept Everquest alive on life support longer than anyone had ever expected that way.

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Shadowlands fall off was more profound than people realize. The participation rate in endgame content was utterly abysmal. I think without Classic that low water mark would have been staggering.

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Is that quarter-million just regular, Vanilla Classic? Or does it include SoD, Hardcore and whatever other variants exist? Because honestly, 270k is a decent chunk of players, but if that chunk is spread across multiple game modes, it becomes a lot less decent.

Classic RP was always going to have challenges. Between seperating the playerbase between Vanilla-Classic and Expansion Progression-Classic, having the setting’s future already written and your characters being effectively stuck in the past, and inevitable dropping interest when players realize either they’ve done all the non-RP stuff they can ever do (Vanilla-Classic) or they’re playing the same content that made people long for Classic servers in the first place (Expansion Progression), players are gonna bleed out.

Add to that the problem that unlike PvP and PvE, RP is inarguably easier or more accessible in Retail. There’s more available spaces, transmog, mounts and pets and toys and whatnot to facilitate RP. Nothing about Classic cannot be replicated in Retail, in terms of RP, but the inverse isn’t going to be true at all. This isn’t quite the case for other modes of gameplay, but becomes a small hurdle or barrier for RP.

And while those are the biggest reasons I’d look to, there’s also a few dozen other reasons at play as well. Like how the appeal of Classic initially was never about the RP. It was the world, the raids, the dungeons, the nigh-eternal BGs and the grind for high warlord (and whatever the Alliance equivalent was). RPers weren’t nearly as loud of a voice clamouring for Classic. Or how many of the things that make Classic appealing for other game modes are detrimental to RP. No portals and slower flight paths means long travel times if you want to host an RP event in a place like Feralas, and a non-scaling world means you might need to rethink the event entirely if you plan to include non-capped guildies in the event cuz those level 30s are gonna have a very rough time with mobs.

Just my thoughts.

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RP is easier and already largely established on retail.

Classic tryhards made RP even more difficult and many non-RPers flooded into RP servers and actively ridiculed RP.

However, if you’re talking about why RP on Classic is inherently different and not as popular as it was back in the day, there’s many reasons for this.

Firstly, the way people RP in these kinds of games is entirely different now. RP has become far more event-based in the modern era due to retail and phasing, along with how relaxed many of the old RP server rules have become. You don’t go about walking around the world and randomly RP with people anymore, that died long ago. Most people want to be left alone to quest unless they need people, and they don’t care to RP.

Secondly, people used to RP whatever generic fantasy they had back in the day, now people RP for the Warcraft Universe specifically. Gone are the days of people RPing Lord of the Rings in WoW.

Thirdly, the resources and knowledge of WoW lore is incredibly different. People now have a plethora of retcons and sources to sift through when roleplaying, back then your sources were in-game quests, fanon, and WoWRPG. Nobody cared or knew about the differences in the Void, Shadow, Fel, Arcane, or whatever other kind of magic there was, and most distinctions between them were incredibly vague or didn’t exist in the lore back then anyway.

And finally, the community is inherently different. Back then WoW was a game populated by roleplaying nerds. Most WoW players came from other mmos or played D&D and other games that had roleplay as a big part of it. Nowadays most people play WoW for the actual gameplay element, and most think roleplay is lame or cringey.

RP in general has largely transferred into a more SecondLife/VRChat version of how RP is done. The idea of crafting narratives or creating stories based on what you think is cool has shifted into more a space for people to socialize vicariously as Elves, Vulpera, Animals, and similar races/themes. Which has always existed, don’t get me wrong, but that appears to be the biggest reason people RP now. Retail will inevitably offer the better tools for that.

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Also, I’ll tell you firsthand, I LOATHE the idea of going back to a WoW where I can’t play as a Blood Elf.

It could just be me, but the fact that I have to chose one faction over the other to actually look cute for my character designs + no transmog ends up being such a non-starter for me when I think about RPing.

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There is many reasons it didn’t do well but I will come up with a few to give you an image.

  1. the world was much smaller and only 2 continents to explore. Means essentially you are closed to the capital cities.
  2. the alliance essentially controlled the whole world. So unless you play one of the 4 tolkien races it is essentially impossible to see the world without being ganked in the enemy zone
  3. ugly models. this goes for both factions that character creation was an infant and people hated looking at their characters when they can’t customize it properly.
  4. no coherent storyline. Essentially the endgame was just raid bosses without a proper setup with like cinematic videos. Only exception was Onyxia.
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I wonder if Classic RP will make a come back in whatever classic based project (classic+?) is coming after SoD.

Imagine having Classic+ that gives us an RP server. A variation of the game that…has a future. It isn’t like Era that just always stays the same. It isn’t like Anniversary that moves onto another expansion.

But a Classic+ that over time new content is added, though lvl 60 is still cap lvl.

I do enjoy the idea of RPing in the Old World. Especially as Horde. Before they fell into the Garrosh/Sylvanas train.

But I also like walk up RP. I don’t want to limit myself to small discord communities.

So hopefully when Classic+ is released, a decant size RP community forms, at least in the first months.

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There is nothing to RP in you are either in Orgrimmar or the Barrens, they didn’t have any other options.

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Just like the idea of RPing in Thralls Horde.