Oh, for sure. Most of my campaigns have been the usual restricted autoattack scenarios, and even with crossfaction communication and diligent tactics there’s only so much you can express with one ability (from a list of permitted abilities) per 5 seconds.
But it’s one of those things that have no perfect solution. Emotes offers the best freedom but limited structure and no visual feedback, restricted gets samey, and unrestricted I find leaves me little time to express anything through emotes or shouts without fatally compromising the fight.
This thread can explain why public RP-PvP campaigns have died off. Not only there isn’t agreement, but we’re already telling who is at a fault for it, and its kind of obvious this accusatory behavior is part of the problem.
To throw my $0.02 (+ adjustment for inflation in), campaign discord servers certainly did not help the OOC atmosphere between Alliance and Horde. Having a direct way of trashtalking people that you’re RPing with is a fantastic way of causing things to break down early. Same applies to Elixir of Tongues imcho. At least back in the day (before discord and elixir of tongues) you had to really go out of your way to be impolite towards members of the other faction.
[i add you on btag, then remove you the moment the R word is mentioned]
It’s a shame, really, since I had some great experiences with the elixir but then you have some people who just want to throw every bit of abuse at the other side like it’s some competition.
Y’all who believing ancient drama wasn’t toxic or hateful are deluded af lmaaoo. God knows your selective memory isn’t working for the countless attempts at guild sabotage and chasing individuals off the server.
I agree here. Drama on AD has always been terrible. People targeted guilds with the intent to destroy them while others came to watch to get a laugh out of it.
But something has changed. I think what changed was the way people approached drama.
I think an huge change was the massive shift in the server’s mentality: initially you had an idea of one huge community. The IC world was intended as a shared place in that regard, and for this reason it was a way to transcend the pettiness of OOC conflict. Mind, it was not above being strumentalized for someone else’s interest (accusations of bad ERP were the best way to create drama back then), but eventually players had to accept that they were bound to meet each other and respect that common ground. The shared space was the common denominator (edit - think of places such as argent archives or the threads on people’s titles that were so popular back then: surely we can’t be all nobles/commanders/archmages”, these attitudes are emblematic of the perception of a shared space).
The shift arrived when people ditched this aspect with a new mentality that went along the lines of “its my money, I do what I want”. This completely broke the idea of server lore and shared space, and eventually removed the condition upon which players could appreciate things such as server lore, and so forth.
Furthermore, it empowers unapologetic behavior, and is bound to mantain disagreements on the OOC area, as the IC isn’t a place to mediate conflicts anymore.
Moon Guard shows us that you can have server lore combined with mentality of “it´s my money, I do what I want”. Server lore is not automatically a good thing precisely because this mindset can become prevalent in approach to what people RP rather than which people they interract with.
I’m not saying server lore is always good. I just think the idea of a shared space brought with itself a different experience. A cohesive server lore was part of this experience, with the good and the bad aspects associated with it.
Edit.
I think you might be right here. But, to put it into perspective, my main point is the difference between looking at the world as something that you have to share with others, and then looking at the world as a mere object, which you have the right to strumentalize as you please.
When we use the “paying customer, I do what I want” card with the intent to free ourselves from other people’s expectations (such as justifying your actions), the idea of a shared space weakens and the path for an alternative approach is set.
Maybe some people like it more this way, but I think this causes a lot of unintended (or intended) side-effects, including the incompatibility of people’s perspectives, and their incapacity to make them work together.
But the shared experience also brings with itself huge problems. If you create environment where everything is accepted and community in its entirety becomes part of RP lore, you lose the ability to do quality control your experience.
And this is where other side of the “I can do whatever I want” mentality comes into play, because that guild which you have to accept (because it´s the right thing to have cohesive world where everyone accepts everyone and server creates its own lore based on people who RP there) has vampires and all other lorebreaking things in it.
I don´t see any reason why someone who wants to do second life RP in a way that breaks the lore (like DH bouncers, void elves behaving like teenagers, Lightforged barmaids and so on) should have this freedom, yet others shouldn´t have the freedom to pick what they want to acknowledge.
A shared space has standards, it’s not a free-for-all environment. It’s why terms such as “bad RP” and “good RP” were hot back then. There were parameters people were expected to adhere to - and if you didn’t, you’d have players trying to expose you (hence, drama) and blame you in front of other people. The moment people go “I don’t care about what you have to say about my role-play” meant rejecting an huge part of what occurred before. Quality control was a thing at the time, as it is now (but in a different way). Back then we had “sons of Illidan” and werewolves, but they are far from gone (I’ve seen three darkfallen and a lich in Duskwood so far - and more!).
It wasn’t perfect, and it had flaws, such as the tendency to create a lot of drama for minor issues, but it gave more cohesion to server as a whole.
