Of course. This was more of a tongue in cheek comment, but yeah. We have a theme for our guild and we stick to it.
Never stopped the ones who’s concepts don’t fit scream at us for ‘gatekeeping’.
4 Likes
Lastly, I want to add - I don’t think that is gatekeeping so long as you don’t exclude such RPers from your overall RP. Guilds are based on certain concepts and each concept is not going to fit everyone and everything. If when not recruiting in your guild you don’t discriminate with whom you RP, then you’re not gatekeeping.
I disagree with this based on experience. One of the individuals who we denied their application of joining our guild due to past public behaviour has gone on the warpath against one of my guild’s officers ever since.
Their behaviour has been extremely toxic and, for lack of better words, absolutely pathetic. We are within our right to never go near this guy and exlude him from our activities because of what he has done.
Threads about RP etiquette and limits pop up very frequently, is it really that rough out there?`
No, I wouldn’t say its rough. I think it is more we are seeing people approach RP and reminders are needed on some acts so we can encourage more to join.
1 Like
I agree with you entirely on this, I should have specified that I was referring to more excluding people based on their concepts from overall RP - and that in extremely nit-picky ways, such as “I don’t want to RP with you cause you’re of the living” in your case for example (again, excluding guild recruitment). If people are being downright horrible, it is a very different case.
Expects OOC approval for RP – “You need to prove yourself before we’ll RP with you.”
I think this is a complex topic as well, as it’s not a black-and-white matter, but rather a scale. People/guilds may be cautious due to previous negative experiences, or they simply want to priorize their OOC friends and guilds over those whom they don’t know.
However, it becomes harmful when let’s say a guild advertises themselves as approachable on forums, discords etc. but then in-game, they act like blocks of ice when attempting to interact with them. And this wouldn’t be just one time scenario, or when they’re busy, but also when they’re leisurely sitting in a hub with nobody else around. You might approach but their replies are short and plain, something which reeks of disinterest - whereas you do know that they can be very engaging and curious whenever talking with their guild members in that same hub. At some point, I’d just get disencouraged and see their adverts of being approachable as false.
This is very valid reasons for any guild to restrict membership or limit interactions. I have been part of and a guest of a plenty of guilds which decline membership on poor OOC behavior.
Then again, the thread was more about communities and open world RP. I think it very self-explanatory that guilds have standards, rules and expectations for a reason.
I think we all sort of know the types… But at that point I just take the hint and don’t RP with them. People don’t have to interested in what I RP or what I wanna do, if anything it’s as close to a net-neutral interaction as it can be in the search of finding cool people wanting to do cool things with me.
For me, this all comes down to OOC etiquette and player courtesy. I’ll toss a couple coins into the well from the POV of an event organizer.
When it comes to similar event concepts; whether it’s about being interested in organizing something with one’s own take on the idea, or trying to ride on someone else’s success and effort?
I’ll use the Lunar Festival as an example, just because it’s something I’ve organized many times in the past on Argent Dawn. My Lunar Festival doesn’t have to be the Lunar Festival - there’s room for more events inspired by the holiday! Be it a Lunar Festival Story Night like the one hosted by Cristana, or a Lunar Procession through zones.
What isn’t cool though, is someone just cloning another player event format, with the exact same organizing plans, without asking.
For instance, many years ago my Lunar Festival in Darnassus event was copied - from word to word and image to image - on the US roleplay servers with no credit for the descriptions or banners. A complete 1:1 copy of it. Only after this was brought to my attention, and they were asked to credit me, they did so. I didn’t ask them to take it down, and the Festival became an annual tradition over there too, with the Moonball sport and all. I’m happy and flattered that my work inspired others to create events of their own, but when drawing inspiration, it’s good to do so tastefully.
When it comes to theme overlap, I personally like to check that my events aren’t overlapping someone else’s event if they’re fairly similar. For instance, last year the Nightblades organized Byltan, a spring festival primarily aimed at the night elf population. Knowing when they wanted to host theirs, I made sure to schedule my own two-day Alor’el Spring Festival with a 2-3 week gap between the events to avoid event exhaustion for the target audience. It’s just about being thoughtful and respecting other people’s efforts despite being passionate about your own, and I wanted both events to be a success. I believe we’re better off trying to support each other than making a competition out of it.
When it comes to gatekeeping event locations, again it comes down to just being reasonable and mindful.
On this, I have another experience I’d like to share:
When hosting the Lakeshire Dance Night the other year, I put the event up on the forums and Argent Archives several weeks in advance. I recall Stormwind was sharded at the time, and Lakeshire was pretty active as people flocked to the surrounding zones for roleplay.
Behold, on the day of the event or the night before, I’m whispered in-game about how a group of guilds are having their tension-filled storyline in the area, and how Redridge is supposed to be dangerous to visit at the time; the jovial dance night isn’t in tune with their storyline. There had been no public notice of this campaign anywhere on the forums, Argent Archives, etc that I could see. Yet I felt I was being scolded for not roleplaying in the area long enough to figure out the pecking order of the local guilds and their private storylines.
If you ask me, if their campaign suffers from other people using the town for running initiatives of their own, they absolutely should’ve brought their plans to the public light instead of expecting others to magically know of them. And even then nobody can claim ownership of a zone - they can only ask other people to respect their initiative and take it into account for a certain period of time.
When I pointed out that my event had been published for weeks in advance, and that nobody had reached out to me until the event was about to happen, the person told me someone from another guild had posted about the matter on my event’s forum thread and never received a reply. Well - I asked the person to point out the post to me, because there was none. After this the person’s tone turned slightly more polite as they realized they had probably been lied to. It was weird and further made me feel like there were people trying to paint me as a troublemaker.
Anyway, if I saw someone hosting a perilous campaign somewhere, I wouldn’t initiate my own event there clashing with the narrative. That’s just common decency. But expecting other people to spend their evenings at one of the few towns near Stormwind to figure out the private storylines going on in order to use the area for one evening for something unrelated, falls to the gatekeeping side of things in my humble opinion.
As far as “gatekeeping” the target audience for an public event, I think that’s perfectly fine as long as the host is thoughtful about the location. Organizing a night elf only ceremony in the middle of Stormwind would chafe at other people’s freedom and the likelihood of being there, while hosting a dwarf only event in one of the rarely used taverns in Ironforge would hardly step on anyone’s toes.
28 Likes
I couldn’t agree more.
Especially the part of being respectful towards hosts. It is time, effort and thought put in things and even if an event doesn’t match my personal ideas, it can be a blast for others!
4 Likes
I know this is slightly off topic, but I’d like to comment on that as it was a trend to have similar things in guilds, events and even characters, be it by people in other RP servers, within the server, or the US servers.
I once similarly had someone copy something of mine in the US servers - a character with the name of my own, the appearance of my own, class of my own and using my commissions as reference for their own commissions. Though the worst part of it was that they were selling traced art under my OC’s name. And sadly such experiences used to be all the rage in the past.
I think in cases like that it’s definitely more of a common decency thing, rather than gatekeeping - provided the lines don’t get blurred too much and people start accusing others of ‘copying’ something that is just similar and not an actual copy paste.
6 Likes
I’m going to pull an internet discourse classic and cite the definition of gatekeeping, according to Google and Oxford Languages.
the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.
As is frequently the case with words such as this, the definition is so broad that it’s basically useless, so I’m going to focus on the “general access” part.
If you have ownership of something and you determine who has access from the very beginning, deciding who gets access and who doesn’t isn’t gatekeeping in my opinion, as access was never “general” to begin with.
But if something was open to general access from its inception and you’re trying to control and limit who gets access to that thing, that is something that I would personally call gatekeeping.
I’ll try to give examples of this in the context of World of Warcraft, though this is just my opinion:
I am running a roleplaying guild that is all about dwarves. I do not allow characters that are not dwarves into my guild.
This is not gatekeeping in my opinion, because it is your guild and you are free to determine who has access and who does not, and the boundaries are clearly stated.
I am running an event that is intended for monks. However, I disapprove of non-pandaren monks and will dissuade them from attending when they turn up.
This is mixed in my opinion, because while you are free to choose who gets to attend your event, advertising your event as being intended for monks, only to quibble over who counts as a “true” monk, when you do not have the authority to determine what a “true” monk is.
I believe that Eversong Woods is primarily a blood elf zone and I will dissuade anyone who isn’t a blood elf from running events in Eversong Woods, especially if the event is not tied to blood elf culture.
This is gatekeeping in my opinion, as you have no authority over Eversong Woods and do not have the right to control general access to the area and who is able to roleplay there, for whatever reason.
I’d only use the term “gatekeeping” in that scenario, in situations where someone is trying to deny, limit or control access to parts of the world or to character concepts that they do not have any ownership over.
Sometimes this gatekeeping has some foundation in the lore (man’ari roleplayers being told not to roleplay in Stormwind City) and can be considered acceptable, while at other points it is based exclusively on the gatekeeper’s taste (non-blood elf roleplayers being told not to roleplay in Eversong Woods).
Also, having an opinion is not gatekeeping, at least in my opinion. Anyone is allowed to disapprove of something, but in order for someone to be a gatekeeper, they need to be trying to deny general access to something that they have no official control or authority over.
Sorry for the long-winded explanation, but I just think that throwing around the word “gatekeeping” to describe any form of limitation isn’t helpful.
8 Likes
The way I see it, role-playing is a bottom-up process.
A person meets another, they organize something. Then other people join, and it becomes a group. Then even more people join, and it becomes a community/guild. Because they all operate in a limited, shared space, we call all the role-playing communities inside Argent Dawn the “AD RP community”, even if strictly speaking, such thing does not exist.
Nobody is under any obligation to acknowledge the role-play of another, and if they do so, it is out of a common courtesy and expectation of reciprocity. In the end… There is only many people making many choices. It is inevitable that, with so many people seeking a shared space, some clash of vibes happens. And it is perfectly fair to keep those you don’t vibe with out of your space.
For this reason I believe a lot of these threads that complain about gatekeeping and badRP are just not bound to work because as I said, they misunderstand the meaning of community. The big AD community is an epiphenomenon, there aren’t rules in common with other groups. In most communities, officers and GM will do that job for you, of finding common ground with other groups. And it is in everyone’s interest to, usually, make it so that groups have compatible rules and stories with other role-playing groups. Because, duh, otherwise they’re the opposite of compatible, and that’s just bound to leave a sour taste in everyone’s mouth (sure, I can role-play as Batman and Robin, it’s just that most people might not want to role-play with me on AD).
But ultimately, my point is: there is no “we” draw the line. There is you and then there is me, and there is many other people drawing the line wherever they desire.
4 Likes
I can’t draw lines. Murlocs just bumrush the gate and leave a mess.
4 Likes
You have to play the theme song everytime you appear. AD characters need theme songs now.
2 Likes
I didn’t actually read the original post until now, but I don’t think the whole “there are too many noble houses” thing comes from it being a popular concept - I think that’s a bit of a mischaracterization. The issue isn’t that there are too many noble house guilds - it’s more that a lot of them fall into the same shortcomings that make it unfun for a lot of participants.
House RP can absolutely offer interesting experiences because you can build up a reputation with other characters and houses and play off of one another. You can run all sorts of events as a lot of house guilds also tend to operate somewhat as merc groups or knightly orders…
…but, a lot of them also don’t offer anything and are essentially roleplaying pyramid schemes where it only really benefits the nobles of the noble house. Characters in servitude of the noble class are essentially just reduced to “guy who does thing because the higher-ups said so”, and it’s even worse when a lot of house guilds in the past historically just mass-recruited, only to then further mass-recruit with the new recruits they recruited.
Now does that mean that noble guilds and house RP shouldn’t happen? No, of course not - if done well there’s absolutely a good basis for character-driven engagement and development - but considering the number of times it hasn’t gone well (long-time players can probably think of a half-dozen examples, I can think of at least one or two) people aren’t necessarily going to dedicate time to a new one when it risks falling down the same pitfalls.
2 Likes
“This room is too full of 
!” kind of energy, basically.
Nah, I do think people say things like “really? Another noble house?” which could be constrewed as commenting on the popularity of the concept, but again I think it’s probably commenting on how these guilds have historically just kinda sucked to be a part of.
2 Likes
I had an example of ‘attempts to gatekeep an area’ not too long ago, around the start of the year truthfully.
Someone was hosting a memorial service, followed by a tournament in Gilneas, and there were some people who did not like ‘tourists’ ( to use the words out of the mouth of one attempted gatekeeper) coming through the area.
This was quickly followed by a near instantaneous post to an IC newspaper that was just catty in tone.
Now, if only that was the end of it, but no, it was not. For said player ( a GM) then proceeded to still show up to the events that he was supposedly against only to badmouth the hosts. And I am told by more than one person that this particular GM ( I dont want to tarnish the whole group even if its more guilds working together) apparently does not like it when anyone else does stuff around Gilneas unless they approve of it.
To which I could only say “Lol, lmao, get in the bin.”
10 Likes
4 Likes
Gilneas has a colourful history of people trying to keep others out. Be it guilds, people from other hubs, styles and topics of RP etc etc.
Meanwhile I think, that the people will simply interact with what they like or they will leave it be.
3 Likes
This entire post vaguely reminds me of stories I’ve heard of human RPers not interacting with or acknowledging other races, as they don’t fit their human-centric, or perhaps GoT/Last Kingdom inspired narrative. I’ve seen this happen a couple of times in certain places while RPing my human similarly, but it was some years ago, so hopefully it’s not like that anymore.
In the end of the day, who people RP with is down to them and you can’t ever force anyone to RP with you. It’s still a bit sad though.
4 Likes
The dreaded ‘applies to a guild with uniforms and then tries every avenue in existence to not wear the uniform (including but not limited to just sneakily changing it and hoping no one notices)’ applicant, feared by military RP officers and GMs across the realm.
5 Likes