Part of this feels kind of natural, though, doesn’t it? With how much easier travel has become in game, those willing to put in a little effort to go somewhere and do something don’t need to spend dozens of minutes getting from Expansion Hub, to Faction Hub, to RP Hub, it takes like 2 minutes at most to get from SW or Orgrimmar to anywhere else on Azeroth.
Probably so. I am still mentally in that now-nigh-forgotten age in which I used to spam Trade Chat with pleas for portals to far-away reaches of Azeroth and beyond. Or if I had to go somewhere beyond the leylines, I saddled my trusty ram and rode into the sunset.
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i’m not the one who started throwing that line around, I was pretty content with having a civil discussion (and I think others were too) until Speedwagone started to derail from that vibe, but I suppose I’m the easier to paint as the bad guy since I’m on the side you “disagree” with. You’re certainly also eager to join in on the bandwagon, though I recognise it’s difficult to look in the mirror.
I can admit that I’ve also started to get a bit carried away, but you did start poking the bear.
I don’t hold that much water to ironic and memey comments, so unless you have anything more concrete on that, let’s just agree to disagree.
Arguing that “yes but there were bad things before…” isn’t much of an argument when absolutely nobody here is saying that outlandish concepts never exited before. I mean, just going by the example of Duskwood RP it has been a pretty “bizarre” place since I can remember so with that I can safely say the quality of the roleplay in the zone has remained consistent.
Consistently bad.
??? What’s the point here? I’m not sure why you’re trying to turn this thread into: let’s discuss jeyce and his forum persona, or jeyce and his quality of roleplay but this ain’t it. Go make such a thread if you really are curious, but I’m not really sure I want to humour your snide remarks about it or what my friends have been doing, not that I wish to speak for them and their intentions anyway. They’re free to do so themselves.
I’ve known a lot of people on these forums and the server who were/are really good at hiding behind their friendly persona masks and the historians of argent dawn could conjure a few tales of such wholesome chungus individuals who turned out to be pretty vile and toxic people who disrupted roleplay, or worse.
Not sure if that would work out that well, but good luck I guess. To me, the whole vibe-checking spiel can only get you so far.
yeah because it’s dead save for a public wine tasting event on a tuesday and a good portion of those bazaar enjoyers have moved over to stormwind
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Its a mix of both, probably. If you remove ‘fine’ and ‘good’ quality as those people continually seek isolation to uphold their personal standards then the bad starts to stand out more and more, because it becomes increasingly the most common type of RP you’ll see w/out ‘fine’ and ‘good’ to help prop it up and create a veneer of it being a mixed bag. There is, undoubtedly, a lot more openly ERP-esque/Sexual advertisement now in places like Stormwind, to the point where people comfortably just walk around trying to get others baited into it which…isn’t great, but you could maybe make the argument that’s always been there and its just far more dominant now than it was before.
I definitely don’t think anyone is saying there was less badRP “back in my day” but its moreso that it is just far more common and prevalent perception-wise. Especially with the complete deconstruction of any sense of “greater community” on AD quality has become an increasingly fractured thing.
Don’t know about these days but last time I saw the Bazaar (around 2022, I think) it was still really poor and a mix between empty and ERPers. That could be changed now though, who knows, maybe its just empty now.
Sure. It is kind of tricky though, a certain blog for example has labelled several guilds and continues to label several guilds, as PCU and or A3 adjacent despite a great number of them not actually having any real association beyond like, maybe a friend or two? Or an implicit agreement to RP with each other? Hell, a lot of the guilds even have people in them that were quite vocally against PCU back in the day. I think even Cursekeeper Association is on the list. This is an extreme, obviously, but its the kind of stuff that tends to happen when people either “insulate” themselves away from ‘badrp’ or try to evoke a higher standard by being around and leading by example.
90% of people need to be dragged kicking and screaming into a lot of things, both IRL and Online. Sometimes that’s to their benefit, sometimes it isn’t and its hard to know when it would/wouldn’t be.
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The docks has been created by ‘refugees’ from Goldshire who wanted ERP of ‘better quality’ (sic). Most of them at start had often more lore orientated profiles and knowledge, yet still the obvious baits.
Three-Four years later, the Docks are now overtaken by obvious Goldshire-like characters, and the refugees went to behind the cathedral now and are more active in the cemetery than they were before.
This is a severe misreading of the state of North American roleplay on a fundamental level, and it’s not helped that many people have only had surface level interactions via Moon Guard Wiki or massive public events a la tournaments that have been talked about in here.
Moon Guard doesn’t necessarily mean a more imaginative server, even if some concepts are, indeed, strange - and even then, I am more than willing to say that Argent Dawn has just as many outlandish concepts; it’s just that Moon Guard has more easily browsable alternatives to Argent Archives. They are big on wikis, carrd sites, websites - while we, really, don’t have seen the need to do much beyond an external site to upload our TRP, art, and stories to.
Onto the matter of Moon Guard, though - they are much more gatekeeping than Argent Dawn is! No, really! It’s just not what Argent Dawn usually does. Argent Dawn will have you gatekept out of a roleplay setting because of a different take in roleplay, or a slight deviation in canon lore - though, sometimes, not very slight.
Moon Guard, on another hand, has communities that, for example, will have you blanket accept an entire list of Laws of Stormwind that is twenty-five thousand words long - and that’s just because it was shortened, with some parts of it just being links to the actual laws. I want you, if you may, to drag your mouse across the text of this article, and scroll down, and see how long it takes you to reach to the bottom; and take into account, this is just one example that came to mind of one community, one that is relatively lenient compared to others I’ve seen in Moon Guard.
https://moon-guard.fandom.com/wiki/Laws_of_Stormwind
Moon Guard, also, is rife with OOC-inspired IC disputes. As a matter of fact, it is known for it. Ask any ex-Moon Guard roleplayer roleplaying in Argent Dawn or Wyrmrest Accord and they’ll tell you exactly how welcoming they are to ‘outlandish concepts’ - and that would be, not very much, unless it’s their flavour of outlandish concepts. Take a look at a particular server that is named like a greek letter for more than five seconds and you’ll get a good taste of what I am talking about. There is no way I can describe it beyond “no, I get to play my outlandish concept / character in a position of power, and if you want to, you better subscribe to this dissertation-lengthed headcanon list.”
I do agree that sometimes Argent Dawn does go over the top with misguided lore adherence though, such as the OP of this thread’s perception of dragons, for example - or more extreme cases of a completely warped perception of what Warcraft is that I won’t go into detail, since it’s all tiresome and not good manners to just air one’s laundry like that in a public forum at every given opportunity.
The North American roleplay servers are not any better. In fact, I’d say they’re worse.
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I did not read the whole discussion the two of you had, my man. I have better things to do! It is still a fair point to make, imho: you come out of a discussion that has put you a bit on edge, and your replies came with that package.
However, while I have some points of agreement with Speed, we may not fully align, and I expect people to treat different forms of disagreement for what they are: two people disagreeing with you. We don’t have to agree on everything or be a single entity to do that.
Speaking of which.
That’s not what was being discussed. My take is that your vision is based on an idealization of the past. It prevents you from realizing that current role-play isn’t really much worse than it was.
What you are quoting as an argument was just an example to reinforce my main point. Nobody ever argued that outlandish concepts never existed before as far as I can read.
Read above: I think you are idealizing the past of Argent Dawn. I just took it a bit further, and suggested that maybe role-play has improved in many ways on this server.
You are right: everyone will hit the bottom now and then. So what’s the take from this, we should always strive to be the worst version of ourselves? There is no difference between trying to be a better person, and always the worst version of yourself? It is a pretty lame take if you ask me.
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Also worth noting that a lot of the people on the forums have been around for years so there’s bound to be more than a few times that they’ve done or said something daft. Argent Dawn–and online communities in general really–have very long memories for slights and grudges, but unless there hasn’t been any appreciable difference in behaviour or attitude, something that happened a decade ago isn’t really relevant today.
Unless you shot someone in a dark alley ten years ago, in which case the police will probably think it’s still relevant now.
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Every time I’m on the forums I be like this
[emerges from the archives with dust on his face]
you rang?
We were all younger 10 years ago (some more than others) so our maturity and grasp of what we knew to be good and bad would inevitably have been lesser. Sure for some players this does not count but I can certainly say a good portion of players in this thread come under that.
There was a greater sense of community because it wasn’t atomised and regimented with things like Discord. Yes you had skype cliques but they were largely restrained to a handful of people at most and / or inter guild use.
Discord has completely warped how people approach RP (its made them lazier in general) and the sense of connection to the in-game world has diminished. This in turn makes the sewage-tier RP look like there’s more (there isn’t, it’s just the good stuff has diminished).
Also people are more sceptical of ‘big community’ drives because they have been shown to attract people who have abused them for purposes they were not intended for and for those not after RP per-se but aggrandizement of their ego and ‘presence’ in the overall fabric of the server.
Brother, Silvermoon is a hollowed corpse.
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It’s been actually getting roleplay lately.
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Beyond wednesday winetasting sessions?
Yeah, there’s a few military guilds using it for walk up roleplay - some of them are even new.
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Considering the fact the man’s a grand repository of atrocious and vile events, people and initiatives going back as far Wrath he’s one of the last people idealizing it.
He’s simply right in stating that certain aspects of the realm are worse now, such as:
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We draw the line at the northern border of Ghostlands. Beyond that, there is nothing of value to be salvaged.
It’s still no Stormwind in terms of activity, yet Silvermoon does seem alive more often these days - certainly more so than has been the case for a fairly long while.
Might be the early onset of Midnight hype, but whatever the case, you love to see it.
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I do actually think role-play was better in the ‘good old days’ because society as a whole was less divided back then and there was more of a genuine effort for many role-players to agree to disagree with each other.
Was there drama? Absolutely. Much of it was very petty and utterly inane, though now that has morphed into purity spirals on both an IC and OOC level. There’s a lot more open hostility towards certain character concepts, preferences and tropes even if they can readily be made to fit the game world. Yet the perceived ‘crime’ is that those very same concepts happen to be of no interest to the ‘peanut gallery’ who do not actually interact with anyone outside of their little clique but will loudly weigh in and seek to tell everybody else what they ought to do, say and think at every possible point.
The server is still large enough that there’s plenty of room for everybody to have a seat at the table without necessarily clashing with or even interacting with each other. I stand firmly behind the idea that curation to varying degrees is sensible and arguably necessary.
Negativity begets negativity after all. I no longer have as much free time as I once did to engage in role-play, so I make a point to limit much of my interactions to those who are not going to cause needless drama or try to drag others down for not wanting heavy real world topics to be brought up every five minutes or for liking or disliking the ‘wrong’ fictional characters and factions in a make believe setting.
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Oh, I know, but given the comments I’ve heard on this thread, I had assumed that ‘Stormwind’ is not a role model to follow, so, I left it out. It sure is not Stormwind, but that is a quality of its own.
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There were more social consequences for acting like a clown. These days? Less so. Trying to put a cordon sanitaire around a person or guild is like trying to be King Knut holding back the tides, a task in futility - largely because of the manufactured hugbox mentality that arose, and is still being jubilantly supported by a number of people in this very thread.
How are we to curate who we do and don’t want to interact with if doing such is seen in these myopic eyes as ‘bullying’ or ‘too negative’? Every hobby has a minimum standard that needs to be met and I’m afraid the number of people achieving that on Argent Dawn in recent years has steadily decreased.
Blizzard treating their own lore like a bog rag has not helped either mind, as it just enables poor quality players in getting a rung on the ladder.
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