WoW: the last bastion of "RP" in MMORPG

Community General Discussion
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I know some of you are more interested in slaying digital dragons or fighting your fellow players in massive battles but there is one community that is often overlooked, the RPers. However we RPers are some of the most stable communities in an MMORPG willing to stick around even if the game is in a slump and preserving the lifespan of a game LONG after it is supposed to be dead. However looking at the new MMORPGs on the market …it looks quite bleak for us RPers

FFXIV: Now you have probably seen this song and dance with me before, I have said that the FFXIV RP community is bad and have been refuted by players from that community. So I decided to tallk to some more people who RP on the game and look at a few more videos and honestly it looks a LOT bleaker than I initially thought.

Now the Creator of FFIXV’s decision to not create separate RP serves to help spread out rp sounded good on paper however he did not follow through with the training the GMs on how to Handle RP. Now in WoW the GMs on the RP servers have ALWAYS understood RP and how it works and have been understanding of it. However this is NOT true in FFXIV. I have spoke to several former FFXIV players who have told me times when they were RPing and some non RPer reported for spam and the RPer ended up being BANNED by a GM because that GM did not understand the difference between RP and actual Spam.

BECAUSE of this the remaining good RPers had to limit their interactions in party and whisper chat. This in turn created guilds and cliques who basically kept to themselves never interacting with world outside their RP echo chamber. Because of this the quality of random RP in the hub cities has gone downhill.

Now I am from MG and other than Goldshire you can find enough quality rp in Stormwind to keep you entertained even if you are not in a guild. However in FFXIV the Random RP quality at its best is basically those Gilneas RPs you can find in Group finder and at it’s worst it amounts to Moon Guard Goldshire. Gmodding (where a RPers forms an action in a way that takes away your ability to respond) and Metagaming (when RPer uses knowledge and information that they did not know In Characer but know Out of Character) run Rampart and it seems like Every other RPer is a Mary Sue (A character that is bascialy perfect in every way Think Johnny Awsome) And this is NOT helped by FFXIV’s lore.

The lore in FFXIV (and this is an issue with a LOT of Square Enix games) is VERY convoluted with some of it’s lore dating back hundreds of previous FF games while other lore from previous games was scrapped. It is FRUSTRATING to try to build a backstory and needing a SPREADSHEET to do it.

ESO: Now I had High hopes for ESO. The Lore of the ES series was rich but easily understood and Since the ES games were single player RPGs the game would be a MAGNET to RPers. I even got this game myself …however what I saw was a disaster.

PHASING ran rampart through the game. Outside hub zones it was IMPOSSIBLE to RP with other people unless they happens to be on the EXACT same Quest and thus the SAME Phase as you were. Because of this the vast world of Tamriel was basically reduced in an RP sense to a few Hub zones, I unsubbed shortly after.

WoW on the other hand has ALWAYS looked out and gone the extra mile for us RPers my favorite example of this was the Elixir of Tongues.

During a patch Blizzard found a fixed a security flaw in the game. However doing so PERMANENTLY broke an addon that would allow players to communicate cross faction. This was bad for RP as it made it nearly impossible to coordinate and Do RPPVP events. Now Blizzard could have simply said “Tough Luck” but they did not not. Instead they put an item in the game the Elixir of Tongues that would allow the use to understand the opposing faction. This item allowed us to continue doing RPPVP events WITHOUT the need of the addon.

This is Why you rarely see Unsub threads from RPers and why we get so Angry when people say WoW is dying because we are Afraid that if WoW dies …RP in MMORPGS as we know it will die with it.

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I’d argue that the form of RP we’re talking about here is rare enough in the first place in video games that nowhere is really a “bastion” of it.

WoW is definitely one of the closest places you can get that actually has a community for it though. Blizzard’s support for it is kind of tentative and mostly reactionary but at least they don’t ignore it entirely.

As a bit of a tangent:
Personally, while I don’t actually care for WoW’s storylines, I think the background lore still creates a very nice “general” setting to roleplay in without having to directly interact with the foreground story, and being an entirely Western game helps form a community I enjoy. BDO and FFXIV both have -some- RP but the communities are very much what you’d expect from overly flashy eastern RPGs.

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Just come to Emerald Meme where everyone RPs as idiots.

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Even reactionary support …is better than no support (sorry if my replies are scarce I want to be able to post this thread to full tomorrow in case it gets burred cause everyone has gone to bed.)

Actually ED only APPEARS to be small right now since everyone is on War Mode (remember ED was an RPPVP server)

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I actually know quite a few FFXIV RPers. They mostly gather on Balmung, the unofficial “RP Server”. Bal is popular enough that it is usually locked to new characters.

ESO was a disappointment in RP support. With costumes, emotes, even “personalities” that change your animations, it seems like a good RP game. But like you said the server structure doesn’t allow it. I think I’ve seen some RP in Riften but that’s it.

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FFXIV was super good for role-playing as I remember. It did not have dedicated RP servers but it had an “RP” tag you could put next to your name to tell others you’re willing to RP, something I’ve been asking for in WoW because some people just don’t care to RP, even if they’re playing on Moonguard! FF also had some nice RP options with its housing system, you could make a tavern and if you’re a bard play music in it. And its emote system was crazy, you had tons of emotes, but you could also change your character’s expression, idle poses and whatnot. The big issue with FFXIV RP was to actually get on Balmung.

Guild Wars 2 was pretty good as well back in its young days. It didn’t have RP servers either, but the RP community that settled on Tarnished Coast was pretty good and I had fun there for a while. Nearly every house in Queensdale was occupied by RPers at a point. No idea how it’s like now, but its “megaserver” tech where all servers are fused makes me thing it has gotten on the bad side. :frowning:

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RP can come in many forms. The kind of RP that you are thinking about is a few people hanging out in a tavern or something like that and then roleplaying a scene through direct communication interactions. I for example do most of my RP on the forums, in discords and through wpvp. There is RP all over the place. The game is flourishing with it. Just perhaps it is not the specific kind you are looking for or you haven’t found the specific people to RP with.

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I heard there was a recent slave auction on Moonguard. Let’s not go there… 'tis a silly place.

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The lore in FFXIV is found in game, the currently 2-volume official lore book (with potentially more volumes to come in the future), and the series of short stories they’ve put on their website that will be collected in one book in the near future. The story itself is mostly self-contained in game outside of those short stories.

You do not need to know about previous Final Fantasy games because most games in the FF franchise are standalone entries, including FFXIV itself.

Connections to previous FF/Square Enix games are in the form of fan service, not actual lore tie ins. (FFXI is probably the closest in terms of the relationship between the feline races found in the two games being mentioned, but even that you can safely ignore if you want.)

From what I can tell, it is actually WoW that has tie ins to previous Warcraft games as well as the various written stories that have been written. I’ve seen WoW players complain that you can miss out on important parts of the story if you don’t have access to those other contents. That said, maybe they’re just talking about plot points of the story, and the actual lore can still be found mostly in WoW.

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As long as your on Tarnished Coast the system does try to put you with your server mates or guild mates. So it’s not too bad because of that.

I never got into gw2 rp myself but I still see rpers around.

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Yes, yes, we’re already well aware that you have some bizarre obsession and hangup with FFXIV, despite the fact that multiple people have repeatedly embarrassed you by demonstrating that you clearly don’t actually have any actual experience with the game, given all the many factual errors, guesswork, and blatant bluffing BS you spout about it.

Whatever complaints people might make about that game, the quality of RP and the RP community has never been one of them. People are not getting banned by “GMs who don’t understand the difference between RP and spam”, nor are they being forced to RP in secret instead of public in order to avoid account penalties. That’s an absolutely mindbogglingly stupid claim.

Why you insist on continuing to make this nonsense up — and insist on repeatedly conveniently inventing loads of unnamed people and unsourced videos that just so happen to back up whatever conspiracy theory you’re harping on this week — is beyond me.

As for FFXIV’s lore, it is self-contained. It doesn’t stretch over “hundreds of previous FF games”, nor can stories or characters from entirely unrelated games be “scrapped”, by definition, and you’d know that if you had ever actually played it. Nobody’s out there playing through FFVII just to make sure their FFXIV character isn’t contradicting lore, because those games are not part of the same world or story.

On the other hand, WoW has literally — and repeatedly — left out key plot moments solely so they could be sold separately in B-grade novels. Rather infamously, the entire ever-so-slightly-important series of events that linked MoP and WoD never even appeared in the game itself, with Blizzard spending their time at the end of MoP actually removing existing core storylines from the game instead of adding new ones.

WoW is objectively one of the weakest MMORPGs on the market for actual RP, both in terms of official developer support and personal player involvement, and this has been the case since its inception. WoW’s most recognisable achievement in the player-driven RP department is the existence of Goldshire on Moon Guard, and that’s nothing to boast about.

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Seriously, every point made about FFXIV OP made shows they have never actually looked into it. I’ve never had issues finding random RP, as people are all over the main cities doing it. Plus they have added so many things into the game that are solely for RP. They are constantly adding new cosmetics and emotes just for fun.

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I think what RP happens in WoW is almost entirely due to the passion of the players for it not so much anything Blizzard has done to support it. That said I love to RP except I refuse to follow the “rules” so I do it my own way.

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Well, Blizzard has made design decisions around it, such as dedicated RP servers, no sharding (in-city) on them, and the tongues potion.

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Thats another issue actually. In WoW even if MG was full ya could still make a char there that simply meant ya may had to wait for Que times. in FFXIV there is LITTLE chance for you to get to Balmung.

EXACTLY and in WoW most of them are flourishing.

Thats just goldshire the rest of the server is quite nice.

So bascialy there is NOTHING for the FF Fans while there are plenty of the Warcraft fans.

Here I will link you what someone said from a different post

Besides I bet you don’t even RP considering your realm and if if you did it probably is limited to Gilneas Kingdom RPs and thus you have a false idea of what “Quality RP” is.

Ty Taric finally someone here who sees the truth.

I can name Two.

Jed’hin was originally created by the RP servers and Blizzard made it Canon on Argus

The Cask an Anvil Tavern Tavern was a name given to it by a dwarf Rp guild and Blizzard made it an official name. Give one ONE example of the FFXIV devs doing the same thing for their game.

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For FF fans, it means they can pick and choose most entries in the series and enjoy it on its own without worrying about not knowing anything else about the franchise. There is something nice about a franchise like Warcraft where everything takes place in a shared universe, but there’s also something nice about a franchise that takes place in a multiverse like Final Fantasy. They’re just two different ways of forming a franchise. It doesn’t make for a lack of lore either way.

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There’s no RP in WOW, but especially now that every mob gains a level as you do.

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RP in FF14 is crazy popular, I don’t know what you’re on about, dude. The two biggest servers in the entire game are the “unofficial” roleplay servers, and they’re being moved to the same datacenter in a couple months, which means all of those people can now play together. Square clearly knows about it.

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that isn’t what RP is.

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The only problem I have with FFXIV RP is that Balmung is locked and Mateus, the “overflow server,” fears decimation every time transfers to Balmung are briefly open. There are a lot of people there dedicated to making the most they can out of the lore, and I’ve met a lot of great characters. Of course you will find Sasukes and catgirl ERP, but you find that here. FFXIV RP also doesn’t attract trolls as much.

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