Agreed. As a fellow DBer, this seems to be an AD thing. But idk if it’s always been this way on AD, of if this is a relatively new Legion thing.
You honour me Morsteth. That’s why I’ve always said (been saying it for years) “Morsteth is one of the fathers of Argent Dawn”
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I personally just don’t really enjoy RPPvP, to me it’s an oxymoron. RP is co-operative, PvP is inherently competitive. People like winning, that’s human nature and you can’t really trust 80+ people in a battle or campaign to suppress that instinct across the board. No matter how many rules or limits you put down there’ll always be someone nudging boundaries to “win” more than the other side.
And god help you if you have any kind of territory system or point scoring in the campaign. Then it tends to bring out the worst in people in my experience. With people constantly going “He cheated!” “No I didn’t!” “Yes you did!” “SoandSo is a griefer” “We totally won that fight!” “They should have lost” and yadda yadda to try and squeeze out as many wins as possible, storytelling and roleplay be damned.
There’s other reasons too but that’s the main one and the rest aren’t wholly relevant.
If people enjoy it, great, but it’s never been something I really enjoyed. I’ve tried numerous times over the years and it seems to end up being nearly the same thing every time, I end up enjoying the camp RP more than any of the RPPvP elements.
Then we enter BfA. A war focused expansion. And basically every guild I know went off to sign up for every single RPPvP campaign that popped up (And for a while to me it seemed like that’s all people did), so my interest in RP as a whole decayed rapidly.
There is then of course the issuse of what do you do in PvP when a normal footman runs into a warrior themed heavily after the actual class? But the footman prefers more grounded, realistic combat RP while the warrior dives deep into the high fantasy side of Warcraft? The two don’t really gel together well and it’s an issue RP has faced since Vanilla.
From my observation that’s because WoD’s entire plot could be ignored. You didn’t have to engage with it, whether you liked the story or the RP set pieces. People were left to their own devices.
BfAs plot sucked everybody in like a black hole. You couldn’t avoid the burning of teldrassil, the assault on the night elves as a whole, the siege of the undercity, the warfronts, etc. And let’s face it, the narrative and themes were… divisive among RPers. Some didn’t mind, some did. I know I didn’t enjoy it, yet it strong armed all my characters into being involved in some way. Some more than others due to their background. And I hated that. And I know a lot of others did too.
Bit of a shame that PvP damage is so insanely high these days. Without a healer even with restricted rules you drop dead in seconds since PvP orbits healers being around. And as a healer you’ll be hard pressed to actually RP.
A friend of mine got jumped by a rogue while healing in a battle, he then emoted being injured and struggling to, well, heal as a result. People started to blast him IC (and OOC) for “not healing”. It ties into the whole PvP element taking prominence in my experience, even if efforts are made to try and make RP the focus.
I enjoyed RPPvP more years ago when PvP damage was much slower overall. But I doubt we’ll ever go back to that unless PvP itself sees an overhaul.
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Yes thank you very reasonable I will now cast my own intuition and years of experience aside and sit there with a dunce hat on drooling and asking myself why it be like that
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I’m hoping that Shadowlands sees a bit of a resurgence, added customisation and a narrative that can be flat out ignored for the most part?
You got me onboard chief.
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inb4 the hole in the ceiling is a literal blackhole and Azeroth gets sucked in.
true, and I think SL is going to be good for RP in this regard
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What scene? It’s ded compared to Alliance.
The highest population (according to realmpop) is blood elves. If you compare the range of blood elves and void elves in the level ranges of 100-120 then you will get a result of 26.629 blood elves and 10.992 void elves. Now let’s say a lot of people left the game, choose to play different races and so forth. Means the majority (atleast it’s what I have predicted and still predict, even before void elves were added) went over to the more “active” Alliance side. Silvermoon was a few months (or so?) a very active hub. Now I feel like even booty bay has consistently more people active. Also the phasing issue in OG (Has Blizzard fixed this yet?) is most likely causing a lot of trouble too.
Considering the other races of the Horde are 3,6% and less… Well… You probably know where this is going.
The lore has probably a huge impact on this too. Especially on a roleplay realm. It’s boring to be portrayed as the bad guys 24/7.
You can’t go anywhere without some Alliance characters going “BUT MUH TREE!!!” even if you’re not Horde allied. It’s getting stale and boring. No matter which char. Some UwU human / kaldorei ALWAYS brings this up. I might as well have my characters wear a shirt with the sign “I AM NOT HORDE” and they probably would STILL bring it up.
Now I know 600000000000000 people will bring up “BUT HORDE IS ALIVE!!!”. Yes, it is alive, you are right. In your own circles. Now imagine you’re just new to Horde roleplay. Alliance characters got no issues going to place to find roleplay. Stormwind (obviously and as the first thought), Duskwood, Redridge and probably a few more places.
What comes on Horde to mind?..
Orgrimmar… Silvermoon (though only restricted since that’s an elven place)… Yea…
Of course if you have a guild this is different or are established in communities. So now let’s pretend I am not fond of guilds (I really am not btw). Where do I go? To the side (Alliance) where I find roleplay 24/7 or to the Horde side where I might have to go into Alliance places to find roleplay if I am not interest in guilds? And if I go into Alliance places, why not just roleplay an Alliance character in the first place?
The unapproachable way of the Horde races is probably an issue too. There’s a reason why humans are the most popular race. “I am a human, so I can roleplay one!”, pretty simple logic despite being not true in Warcraft. Any Horde races has an entire lore and culture you will have to get into and many just choose the easier path, which is human or so.
TLDR:
People choose Alliance because Horde is dead.
is not and never has been an accurate reflection of the (active) RP community
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I think it’s probably more complicated than that, like Taxania says, there can be a lot of reasons people are upset at a loss or a defeat that have nothing to do with the defeat itself. There are plenty of people - like Loras - that are happy to have their character defeated in PvE DM’d stories or as part of a collaborative story-telling effort - plenty of players that are happy to let their characters experience humiliation, pain, suffering, and misery in the right story and context.
I think the difference is consent, like Obilot says - but maybe more than consent, control. A PvE loss is likely to be meaningful to the character itself, likely to contribute to their development or arc, because the player is co-authoring the narrative - whereas if another player, through PvP or other means, is allowed to defeat your character, that may never end up in satisfying or rewarding RP.
A quick caveat - allowing player characters to beat mine absolutely can and has led to meaningful and enjoyable roleplay for me as an RP’er.
However, when the means of that victory have come through meta-gaming, rather than because of character choices, or if the consequences of that loss go on to make a mockery of all reason or logic, or if the victory itself compromises the writing of my character, forces me to effectively break character by accepting it, then it’s not remotely satisfying to RP. Losing to another character can be seen to devalue your own because you’re essentially saying - my character is not as strong, smart or skilled as this character. My character is made weaker or stupider than I intended by this loss. If the other player is taking the IC victory as somehow an OOC triumph, then that can also be particularly difficult to accept, because the fight has become a sign of OOC disrespect as opposed to IC antipathy.
Just speculating - I tend to play underpowered characters so if they do win, it’s usually by luck, low cunning, or outright cheating, and losing for my character is the default rather than the exception - but the losses that have been least satisfying to me have been the ones that compromise the logic of the world, typically because of lazy guard roleplayers and bad faith on the part of the other player. When somebody attacks or beats up my char, fine, no problem - when that person then refuses, OOC, to be arrested, subdued, or even just questioned by a guard, and walks away scot-free, the whole setting just got stupider, never mind my character.
Sorry for slow-posting, on my fone, so the conversation might’ve moved on.
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Ultimately we can sit here and pinpoint problems in the community ourselves, and others but it wont change things. People need to be proactive.
If you have no imagination, still waiting on a cadre of Horde druids attempting to heal the Ghostlands or the dead scar. Or even orcs/goblins going there to study magic. 
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BfA certainly was a big shake up. And seeing as it resulted in the loss of two rather major, if underused, RP hubs… yeah, kinda easy to see why people were miffed. A lot of RPers hated the Cataclysm as it destroyed the park (which was more or less MADE for RPers with tons of empty buildings) and set fire to other areas, for a similar set of reasons.
Depends where you go. I’ve been to neutral stuff lately now the war is over and if anything I was weirded out how friendly the night elves were to me on my Horde characters (Relatively, one was outgoing but the rest were giving me the stinkeye, which I find understandable and don’t object to).
Yeah that’s absolutely it, people are upset OOC that things slip out of their own hands because of role play and that’s really bad
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Hey, intuition has its uses. No one will blame you for avoiding someone who rubs you the wrong way and who you’ve got a bad gut feeling about. It’s just making accusations and statements about other people based on hunches that can be a little awkward.
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Which would be again a “group based” thing. Though not gonna meme, if there would be more “world” initiatives, maybe people would come more together. Things that are not rp-pvp or only guild centred. Like the Hallow’s End events.
Not really, roleplay is 100% what you make of it.
If a lone orc mage roleplayer sets off to Silvermoon and tries to embed himself in roleplay there then that’s cool. If it’s a group of people setting off for DM’d stuff that’s cool too. There’s nothing really stopping any Horde race from being in areas of other Horde races. Even despite the contrast of culture and attitudes.
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The contrast of culture and attitudes is often what makes roleplay fun. Having an orc or other ‘Kalimdor Horde’ race milling about Silvermoon should add some variety for the locals too.
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It’s the strongest selling point of Horde roleplay to be honest.
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That would be pretty lit but as we know the average person isn’t that creative, they would prefer to choose a race on Alliance where things like that don’t have to be thought of. This is also why so many military / house guilds exist. Creativity is not a thing of the majority of people.
And you are right. Though many people I talked to feel uncomfortable and then avoid it in the first place, having no place then to rp. I tell eveveryone to go to places but most are like “BUT WHY WOULD MUH CHARACTER BE THERE???”. Which is promptly answered from me with a “just do it” or “well, then I guess you have 2 choices. 1. Have no roleplay and cry about it or 2. just do it”.
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It’s always been that way, we’ve had skype cliques and groups that have wanted to control the server as far back as vanilla. If they decided they didn’t like you then that was it, for what ever reason that may be no matter how harmless or insignificant, they would find a way to have you exiled from the server or use their influence to ostracize your guild. At times they went as far as to go on private servers to fake ERP screenshots so they could defame people. I’d say the modern community isn’t any where as near as unpleasant as the old, most of the old school pillars were genuinely terrible people and many of them came across as low-key narcissists that honestly had some serious issues. It wasn’t immediately obvious but once you spent enough time around them and the veil dropped it was a rather depressing experience, a direct window in to what mental illness looks like. Almost all of them were hypocrits and massive degenerates that acted like a pseudo-elite, one set of rules for them and another for everyone else outside of their circle of ‘friends.’ (read: sycophants)
The things some of the older players on these forums could tell you about Argent Dawn’s old community pillars would make anyone’s toes curl. They acted in the same way people like Alex Jones (infowars) talk about the actual elite. Great content creators but terrible people.