The more mature approach is actually bait, and it’s a holier-than-you plague that ruined three night elf hubs:
Feralas
Ashenvale
Amirdrassil
Those zones are dead.
The nelf communities failed to attract new roleplayers, they always looked down upon everyone else than their established 10 years+ cliques and were unable to say “NO” to the obvious power hungry masters who jumped on discord ownership so they wouldn’t be able to be banned or excluded as the inertia of hundreds of lone roleplayers could not overcome the plague of a dozen of vocal, well organized ones.
I mean, anyone can say they focus on things for the better of themselves, but when the result is everyone fleeing the hubs because they are interacting with people pretending to like them while they always walk away silently, uh?
You may want to reconsider calling this a ‘mature’ approach. It’s just a politician approach of not making any troubles to be liked by everyone for personal clout while everything dies down around them.
But when you take a look at the result, when you see how fragmented the nelf communities are eyeing themselves with disgust, when you look at how empty the hubs are, how new roleplayers are sucked into the worse existing guilds, you immediately understand the forum-polish and the happy smiles are just all is left of previous, failed attempts to control nelf RP.
And before y’all jump on me, it’s not aimed at Acrona, she does a lot for the community and isn’t appreciated enough in comparison.
I’ll just hang in a little longer maybe Blizzard will realize that it’s kind of mega lame to put all races’ paladins under the human paladin aestheti- https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Tyr%27s_Guard
I would say that a lot of hubs have died over time. Part of this is due to WoW being old: many players have left, others don’t have a lot of time on their hands and casual hubs suffer a lot because of it. There is not an influx of new young players with time on their hands. So when you say that:
…the age of the game may also play a part in that.
Still, I do think you have a point when you say the mature approach can turn into a snake biting its own tail. Like every other virtue, it can turn into a vice when one fails to act with moderation.
I was not a part of the flourishing night elf community of old. Actually, I have never been part of the night elf community, old or new. But my interactions were usually mixed. I think some exclusivity is nice, it makes people want to join. On the other hand, I also believe looking down on other players is not exclusive, and it is just being toxic.
When I interacted with a lot of elves, I had the impression it was the norm to kind of look down on non-elf characters. This, I say, is different from curating one’s experience, and sometimes it felt like the lines between IC and OOC were a bit blurred, with people actively enjoying trying to boss others around.
And I think this is different from curating one’s experience. It equals to actually going out of your way to slightly punish those who aren’t like you. Or to remember them that they have made the wrong decision.
I’m sorry for that though! Hopefully things will change a bit over time, and night elf players will come to appreciate one another more.
Oh definitely not. I recall Night Elves running organizations in Stormwind, gender-changing potions for a laugh, a jungle gnome with a taste for raw rats, Demon Hunters in Kalimdor years and years before Legion was even announced - the list goes on. It was quite the Wild West, and I can’t really put my finger on when and why that began to change for the majority of the server.
I suppose it’d be easiest to simply say that the playerbase got older and began taking themselves and the hobby more seriously. In my case that probably comes down to time being a more limited factor now than it was ten years ago, so I have less headspace for the wacky interpretations of lore now than I did back then. And in writing that, I realize how stifling that might actually be, in a hobby where creativity is the lifeblood.
Again - this is my own anecdotal take however. Whether that applies to the community or not is anyone’s guess, but I do concur that the AD of today is a good dreal more rigid than it was years ago. Is that for the better or worse? That has to be down to the individual.
In my opinion, the decline of night elf hubs is simple and has repeated dozens of times:
Some people organize and promote roleplay in an area. When it becomes visible that roleplay regularly happens someplace, people are interested to come by to see what’s up.
It attracts more players, the population snowballs, creating buzz.
Some months in, immersion suffers as more and more characters that aren’t a great fit for the setting show up chasing easy access to roleplay, or conflicts between groups lead to OOC tension. The badmouthing of the hub begins, similar to critiques we constantly see of Stormwind or Duskwood RP.
Many people leave, including the original organizers, with no one stepping up to sustain the momentum. The cycle repeats after months or years.
I’ll admit, I don’t get along with everyone in the night elf RP scene. Some attitudes and takes on roleplay feel alien to me. Thankfully, I avoid leadership roles (running guilds, Discords, long-term campaigns), so I’ve been able to focus on my own RP and community initiatives without getting caught in all the drama. You might see this as a lazy or poor approach, and that’s fair. For me, though, it’s what’s kept me from burning out on WoW RP or going gray years ago.
I believe the issues aren’t unique to night elves; the spotlight exists because Argent Dawn has enough night elf roleplayers to form hubs in the first place. I’ve no doubt similar issues would arise with equally large roleplay communities for other races (humans aside). But even despite the numbers, night elf guilds typically have roaming concepts rather than being stationary (compared to concepts like the Stormwind City Watch), which adds to the scattered nature of the scene.
Also, even with a conclusion in Amirdrassil, lets not discount the effect of War of Thorns, SL and ‘but only renewal’ on peoples satisfaction with the setting and lore that’s been put as the backdrop.
People can roll their eyes about ‘Nelf posters’ all they want, but there is some truth behind even the most unhinged and ranty examples.
I think things were ‘better’ back in the ‘good old days’ simply because there was more of everything. The good and the bad.
You could dive right in, propose a particular concept and generally get something up off of the ground even if it happened to be fairly niche.
Now? Not so much. It’s a lot harder, especially if you’re a new or returning player with minimal contacts.
When I had more free time back then, I was happy to create and lead projects and guilds myself. Now? Not so much. I mostly play for raiding now and role-play is something I enjoy on the side, generally with trusted contacts.
I’m not against meeting new people but it’s a tedious process. Silvermoon is a lot quieter than it used to be and definitely ‘rigid’. Certain guilds do not interact with ‘outsiders’ whatsoever even if you happen to stumble across them somewhere in Quel’Thalas.
It’s partly why I just moved over to the Alliance. Midnight will almost certainly breathe some new life into Quel’Thalas and the various Elven role-playing scenes so I am looking forward to that but for now it’s just too much of a culture shock to see Silvermoon be so quiet when it used to nearly rival Stormwind in terms of how bustling it could get in the evenings.
This is very important to people. For all the attempts to organize RP, to a lot of players it is casual role-play that they want to do the most.
Making a character, giving them some polish and tossing them into a hub is a common practice. Remove casual role-play, and a lot of people will abandon said hub.
RE: Everything, everyone etc,
I’m also one of those jaded roleplayers who have come to prefer lore accuracy and a certain “standard” of roleplay, but also am in that mentioned spot of wanting to allow for more out there stuff like I used to back in the days. I’ve found the best way to do this is to simply give people a chance before you judge.
Sure, some people are out of place because they don’t care or because “Velen said so”, but you’ll quickly learn that a lot of people might actually have incredibly interesting reasons IC for being where they are or who they are and it’d be an awful shame to miss out on that story.
I think that the players attracted to their concept are uninterested in their design, and the players attracted to their design are uninterested in their concept.
It has been like this for several years and yet it’s truly such a pity and something I’ll never get used to. Though the last two or three days it has been a little busier, it’s still a far cry from what it was.
I don’t know if Midnight will necessarily aid in its revival, as any unification teased by Metzen might lean more in favour of Alliance elves from which I can only imagine blood elf RPers would alienate themselves and pull away from (at least at first, but if they stick around acceptance will come sooner than later as it always does, provided this is what the lore dictates). I don’t know much about the Alliance save for a few friends/guild I RP with, but as an outsider looking in, it’s hard not to be jealous of how busy their hubs can get.
With most of the RPers there though, I always end up wondering - as Alliance seems to be doing so well, would people be tempted back in belf RP even for Midnight? Especially when, given the TWW model, the Quel’thalas stuff is likely to span across just one patch?
It also depends on how much tolerance people have for the endless cacophony of “Uuugh, furries!” “Bluh bluh, joke race, bluh!” “Pandas are bad, these are worse!” “Uwu but they’re just little cutesy wutesy fluffy foxies, they can’t be dangerous at all!” aaaaand so on and so forth.
I haven’t played Rek enough to run into Wild Patronisers yet - in fact, his first outing in Org was rather good, and he even got to flex a little in the tree-side brawl he had (thank you, dice gods…) But I’m sure the attempts at head-pats and talking down from Big Strong Manly-Man Orcs and such are just waiting to strike.
TL;DR - if wider community want more ‘serious’ Vulpera characters and guilds, then you gotta be willing to treat them as a serious race and serious characters because they are and can be.
Statistically speaking it is incredibly unlikely. The sheer attrition Horde has suffered will just continue and the more likely outcome is that the Alliance will see a surge in QT RPers using Void Elf Models for High Elves, or actual High Elves should they be released. If it includes reuniting all Elves then you also have to add Night Elves into the mix. The truth is just that the Alliance has more flavors of Elf and with all Elves becoming one again people will just ask:
“Why not make an Alliance Elf so I also get 80% of the RP population as a side-benefit?”
Not to mention the amount of Humans and Light-Worshippers Alliance-side, something that’s going to be extremely important in Midnight. The Horde, by comparison, has almost no ties to the Light as a force or religion. It’s worth being pragmatic and looking at the potential character list for Midnight as well.
The year is 44 after the Dark Portal. Aerilen Ashforge awakens to see the High King of the Alliance side-by-side with Lor’Themar, the Void Elves have been given half of Silvermoon as reparations, Alleria is being hailed as a Hero, a Half-Elf is next in line for the Sun-King’s Throne.
You awake in a cold sweat, you are Zul’Jin. It is 5 years after the Dark Portal, you are preparing to aid the Orcs in laying waste to Silvermoon. What you have seen cannot come to pass. Silvermoon must burn.
